Original source URL: http://www.burbankdigest.com/node/52 12/6 The Hidden Holocaust in History, Ahmed; Holocaust Commission & Denial, Polya,; Holocaust Homeland Posted December 6th, 2007 by liz burbank The hidden holocaust -- our civilizational crisis, part 1: The holocaust in history By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Online Journal Contributing Writer 1. ³Hidden Holocaust². As we are all aware, the term ³Holocaust² is traditionally used to refer to the ³systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The word ³Holocaust² is a Greek word, which means ³sacrifice by fire.² It conveys an event, the scale and horror of which, transformed the course of world history. Moreover, it¹s often seen as a crime against humanity that is unparalleled and unique. This, we cannot dispute. The Nazi Holocaust was, indeed, a uniquely horrific genocide, whose enormity and systematic character is barely imaginable, designed to exterminate wholly the Jewish people, physically, socially, culturally, from the face of the Earth. *** But what then, do we mean by a ³hidden holocaust?² This term conveys the reality of a campaign of global homicide, murder, whose scale and enormity is such that one feels that the word ³holocaust² does, certainly loosely speaking, apply. It is ³hidden," in the sense that, although experienced by millions of people around the world both historically and today, it remains invisible, officially unacknowledged. This ³hidden holocaust," is escalating, accelerating, intensifying; according to all expert projections from the social and physical sciences, it may culminate in the extinction of the human species, unless we take immediate drastic action, now. 2. ³Civilizational Crisis² We often hear the word ³civilization." It¹s often been used to explain the dynamics of the War on Terror, as a clash between two civilizations, the advanced, developed and progressive civilization of the West, and the backward, reactionary civilization of Islam. As is well known, the man who first formulated this idea as an academic theory of international relations was the Harvard professor and US government adviser, Samuel Huntington. In early 2007, then Prime Minister Tony Blair described the War on Terror as ³a clash not between civilizations," but rather ³about civilization.² The War on Terror is, he proclaimed, a continuation of ³the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace the modern world and those who reject its existence.² [³A Battle for Global Values," Foreign Affairs (January/February 2007) But the ³hidden holocaust² is not an aberration from our advanced civilization that represents the peak of human development, requiring only some reforms. Rather, the ³hidden holocaust² is integral to the very structure, values and activities of our civilization. It is part and parcel of the ³global values² of the international political and economic order... 3. The Genocidal Conception of Modern Civilization The hidden holocaust associated with our modern civilization, began at the beginning of modern civilization itself. The origins of modern civilization can be found partly in the pivotal voyages for European colonial expansion and trade from the 15th century to the 19th centuries. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, English and other explorers ventured out from their home countries in search of new wealth and new land in all corners of the globe. They went to the continents of America, Africa and Asia and set up colonies and trading outposts. Colonists and settlers had all sorts of intentions. Some of them had capital, and were simply looking for new investment opportunities. Others were trying to escape lives of hardship at home to make new lives for themselves with a fresh start by settling in the colonies. Others wanted to deliver the message of Christianity to native populations. Almost all of them saw themselves as part of the inevitable historical momentum of progress, bringing the fruits of European civilization to backward peoples. Whatever the intentions, European expansion involved massive, systematic violence. Violence of all kinds. Wholesale massacres, forced labour camps, disease, malnutrition due to the imposed conditions of economic deprivation, mass suicides due to depression and cultural alienation. As Irving Louis Horowitz argues, for example, ³the conduct of classic colonialism was invariably linked with genocide.² [Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1976), p. 19-20.] Below we review some salient examples. 4. American Holocaust Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex civilizations of native Americans, over the next few centuries, were devastated. British historian Mark Cocker has reviewed reliable estimates of the death toll: ³[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico . . . Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.² [Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe¹s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 5] Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders, consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists, religious and cultural dislocation, and so on. As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide, which he describes as an ³American Holocaust," these factors accelerated and intensified the mere impact of disease. He further describes the colonists¹ strategic thinking: ³At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance Œas vassals¹ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer Œall the mischief and damage¹ that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you.² [David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 255] This choice put to the Native Americans five centuries ago bears an unnerving resemblance to the rhetoric underpinning the War on Terror today, ³you are either with us or against us.² 5. African Holocaust In Africa, the slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted deaths of vast numbers of people. While slave structures had already existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it adopted in the course of European interventions. English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by raiding villages off the West African coast. The transatlantic slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of ³a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas.² An observer at the time, British journalist Edward Morel wrote: ³For a hundred years slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death.² [The Black Man¹s Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)] From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died ³in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East² is unknown, among the slaves ³kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.² Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 -- and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 -- Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)]. University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn has demonstrated convincingly the centrality of capitalism to the growth of new world slavery, arguing that the profits of slavery accumulated in the ³triangular trade² between Europe, Africa and America contributed fundamentally to Britain¹s industrialization. For instance, the profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britain¹s gross fixed capital formation. [Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso), p. 572.] The question of capital formation, however, is only part of the story. The transatlantic slave trade was an indispensable motor in an emerging capitalist world system under the mantle of the British empire. The mechanization of cotton textiles, originally produced in American plantations manned by African slaves, was overwhelmingly the driving force in British industrialization. [CK Harley and NFR Crafts, ³Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth," Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (1994, no. 420)] 6. Indian Holocaust In his landmark study, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), historian Mike Davis shows how British imperial policy systematically converted droughts in South Asia and South Africa into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines. In India, between 5.5 and 12 million people died in an artificially-induced famine, although millions of tonnes of grains were in commercial circulation. Rice and wheat production had been above average for the previous three years, but most of the surplus had been exported to England. ³Londoners were in effect eating India¹s bread.² Under ³free market² rules, between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while millions of Indian poor starved to death. Crucially, Davis argues that these people died ³not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.² 7. Division of the World This violence was, therefore, not merely accidental to the European imperial project. It was integral, systematic, as a solution to the problem of native resistance. Between about 1870 and 1914, European imperial policies received a new lease on life, resulting in the intense scramble for control over eastern Asian and African territories. Almost the entire world was divided up under the formal or informal political rule of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Japan. Between themselves, in Africa for instance they acquired 30 new colonies and 110 million subjects. African resistance was brutally crushed. Consider, for example, the 1904 uprising of the Hereros, a tribe in southwest Africa, against German occupation. The German response was to drive all 24,000 of them into the desert to starve to death; others who surrendered were worked to death in forced labour camps. [Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man¹s Conquest of the Dark Continent, 1876-1912 (London: Random House, 1991).] During this period, we can already see drastic inequalities in the international system. By 1880, the per capita income in the developed countries was approximately double that of the ŒThird World.¹ By 1913, it was three times higher, and by 1950, five times higher. Similarly, the per capita share of GNP in the industrialized countries of the developed core was in 1830 already twice that of the Third World, becoming seven times as high by 1913. [E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London: Abacus, 1987), p. 15] In summary, for five hundred years, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples were slaughtered, decimated, deported, enslaved, starved, exterminated, impoverished, and forcibly assimilated into an emerging world system dominated by Western Europe. This was how the global values and politico-economic structures of our civilization came into being. Globalization . . . the bloody legacy of a 500-year killing machine. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and the author of "The London Bombings" (2006), "The War on Truth" (2005), "Behind the War on Terror" (2003) and "The War on Freedom" (2002). part 2:The Hidden Holocaust in History: EXPORTING DEMOCRACY http://nafeez.blogspot.com/ 1. The Real NWO In part 1, we reviewed the emergence of the modern world system through a process of systematic genocidal violence conducted across disparate continents, killing in total thousands of millions of indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia and America. But this ³hidden holocaust² didn¹t end with the demise of colonization: Because colonization never underwent a genuine demise. Rather, it underwent a fundamental re-configuration, prompted by rising demands for freedom and independence from around the world. By 1945, the end of the Second World War, the contours of a new international order were in place. According to US professors Lawrence Shoup and William Minter its design was being prepared several years earlier. It was known as the ³Grand Area Strategy², drawn up by US State Department policy-planners in liaison with experts from the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC. If you want evidence for a plan for empire, you won¹t get better than this. The planners identified a minimum ³world area² control over which was deemed to be ³essential for the security and economic prosperity of the United States and the Western Hemisphere.² This ³world area² included the entire Western Hemisphere, the former British Empire and the Far East. Grand Area Strategy saw that US policy was ³to secure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that constitutes a threat² to this world area. But this policy could only be pursued on the basis of ³an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.² So the concept of ³security interests² had to be extended beyond traditional notions of territorial integrity to include domination of these regions ³strategically necessary for world control.² Sounds strangely familiar, right (think "PNAC" or "Defense Planning Guidance")? In other words, national security, economic security and imperial consolidation were interconnected components of Grand Area Strategy. State Department planners had no illusions about what this meant. Indeed, they candidly recognized that ³the British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear², and that therefore ³the United States may have to take its place.² Grand Area planning was about fulfilling the ³requirement[s] of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power.² [War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Cited in Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and US Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). This edition is now out of print but I believe it is available in print-on-demand format.] 2. The Problem of ³Freedom² So what next? The contradiction between revamped American plans for the extension of a new imperial order, and the struggles for national independence breaking out across Africa and Asia, to be resolved. American and British policy planners recognized the need to subvert the process of decolonization, to sustain control. D. K. Fieldhouse, Professor Emeritus in Imperial History at Oxford University, notes that the economic dependence of the colonies was ³the intended result of decolonialism.² [D. K. Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945-80: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 5] Similarly, Robert Winks, Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History and chair of the Department of History at Yale University, explains that ³the imperial nation controlled the process [of decolonization] to the end.² [Robin W. Winks, ŒOn Decolonization and Informal Empire¹, American Historical Review (Vol. 18, No. 3, June 1976), p. 540-42] Part of the plan to subvert decolonization was implemented through direct force. Since 1945, the United States, with routine support from Britain, has conducted military interventions into more than 70 nations in the South. Many of these were conducted in the context of the Cold War, supposedly to fight off the Soviet Union, which, we were told, was intent on imminent invasion of Western Europe and possibly even the American mainland. But in truth, the vast majority of interventions conducted had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but were indeed fought to put down nationalist independence movements across the Third World. The paranoia and fear over the USSR allowed Western policymakers to label anything that threatened Western domination as Communist. According to former State Department official Richard J Barnet: ³Even the word Œcommunist¹ has been applied so liberally and so loosely to revolutionary or radical regimes that any government risks being so characterised if it adopts one or more of the following policies which the State Department finds distasteful: nationalization of private industry, particularly foreign-owned corporations, radical land reform, autarchic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet or Chinese aid, insistence upon following an anti-American or non-aligned foreign policy, among others.² [Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World (1968)] 3. 1945-1990: Third World Holocaust? The scale of the death toll from these interventions is staggering. William Blum, another ex-State Department official, describes the vast loss of life resulting from post-1945 military interventionism in the Third World as a full-scale ³American holocaust.² [Killing Hope: CIA and US Military Interventions Since World War II (London: Zed, 2003)] How many innocent civilians died as a consequence of these military interventions? A detailed break-down of figures can be found in Unpeople (Random House), by the British historian Mark Curtis, a former research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Curtis¹ conservative calculations confirm that Britain has been complicit in the deaths of over 10 million ³unpeople², expendable people from far-off foreign lands whose lives are worthless compared to the significance of a specific set of overriding strategic and economic interests. Here¹s another overall estimate from the American development expert, Dr J. W. Smith, director of the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona: ³No society will tolerate it if they knew that they... were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990.² [J. W. Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (Arizona: Institute for Economic Democracy, 2003)] Dr. Smith¹s figures, it should be noted, point not only to a core of up to 15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, but a further unknown 100 million plus who died as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of peripheral economies. We do not recognize the post-war period as a ³holocaust.² But it was only a few years after the appalling genocide against the Jews was revealed to the world that the dictum ³never again² was forgotten, a pointless platitude by which to ignore the pleas of millions. The reasons we do not recognize this period as a ³holocaust² are several. Firstly, our political culture does not really acknowledge the scale of the interventions that our military intelligence services conducted across the South. Secondly, consequently, such figures are totally unheard of. Thirdly, our political culture is not equipped to comprehend these 70 plus military interventions as manifestations of a single expanding system. Rather, we are accustomed to thinking about our history, about these events, about politics, in a fragmented and disjointed manner. Yet it is precisely this political culture that means that our history, perhaps even our historical complicity in this ³hidden holocaust², remains invisible to the majority of citizens. 4. Covering Iraq The same political culture that mystifies and obscures the systematization and globalization of genocidal violence in the emergence, expansion and consolidation of the modern world system -- not only since 1492, but even continuing past 1945 until now -- means that even current events are difficult for us to truly assimilate and understand. This is particularly true of our involvement in Iraq. A fragmented and disjointed method of analysis ingrained in our political culture, incapable of serious or sustained self-critique and self-reflection, prevents us from envisioning the Iraq Holocaust as it truly is. For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. Western pundits, politicians and political analysts routinely debate the emergence of a new form of American empire after 9/11, particularly in relation to Iraq. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood. A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that some scholars consider to be genocidal. While not attempting to actually resolve the questions here, if this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations in the context of a renewed exploration of the history and theory of imperialism and genocide. [5. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 1 The ³Arab Façade²...[the British phase omitted for space] 6. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 2 Our ³Policeman² The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq. After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. [Roger Morris, ŒA Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,¹ New York Times, 14 March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait. [Aburish, op. cit.] He thus became ³regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.² Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim¹s administration, with the CIA at the helm.² In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime,² notes the NY Times. ³Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents.² Former Ba¹athist leader Hani Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 was colluding with the CIA at this time. [Aburish, op. cit.] Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors, resulting in the decimation of much of the country¹s educated class. Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however, was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam himself ³had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.² [Aburish, op. cit.] US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the operation. According to the CIA¹s royal collaborator: ³Many meetings were held between the Ba¹ath party and American intelligence - the most critical ones in Kuwait.² Although Saddam¹s Ba¹ath party was then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the CIA due to the group¹s close relations with the Iraqi army. Aburish reports that the Ba¹ath party leaders had agreed to ³undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies² in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba¹ath party leader, Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad. [Aburish, op. cit.] In 1968, another coup granted Ba¹athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had ³often heard CIA officers ‹ including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time ‹ speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.² [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military coups brought the genocidal Ba¹ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein, to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests. Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of ³excess mortality² ³the difference between actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics² -- Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power [Gideon Polya, ³Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust², Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007)] Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with Iran (1980-88) -- killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89) against the Kurds -- killing 100,000 people including the gassing of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the provision of funds and technology to Saddam¹s regime, describing it as the ³West¹s policeman in the region.² The international community, in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam¹s acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing [Anthony Burke, ³Iraq: Strategy¹s Burnt Offering², Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206; Curtis, p. 129] 7. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 3 ³Paying the Price² Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce Department¹s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq¹s infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign. [Beth Osborne Daponte, ³A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War² Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993)] 1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to prevent Saddam¹s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime, a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. ³Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam] is in power², warned Robert Gates, then presidential national security adviser and current Defense Secretary [Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)] Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the deaths of Iraqi civilians [George E. Bisharat, ³Sanctions as Genocide,² Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11, No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, ³The Role of ŒIraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities¹ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others², Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July 2001) 8. Iraq Holocaust: Phase 4 Exporting Democracy Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study, published in Lancet, by John Hopkins University¹s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry¹s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence¹s chief scientific adviser described the survey¹s methods as ³close to best practice² and its results ³robust², advising ministers not to criticise the study in public. [Paul Reynolds, ³Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates², BBC News (20 October 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm; Owen Bennett-Jones, ³Iraqi deaths survey Œwas robust¹² BBC News (26 March 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm]. Indeed, Lancet¹s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion. [Tina Susman, ³Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million², Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007)] These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to a total of 3 million. The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team, whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australia biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war. == digest note: i have inserted the following relevant excerpts, 'carve up strategy' & 'fostering conflict' before the conclusion of Ahmed's Holocaust article, from another article of his posted Nov.4, 2007, Dissecting the Disinformation on Western Secret Strategy in the New Middle East Wars http://nafeez.blogspot.com/ == The Carve-Up Strategy One doesn¹t need to be a historian of empire to know that divide-and-rule is a rather standard strategy of imperial domination. It was deployed by the British, for example, to great effect in key colonies in North America and India against natives who, once divided along artificially exacerbated ethnic, religious and tribal classifications, were far easier to play off against one another, and thus control to the benefit of the colonial regime. From the very beginning, American planners envisaged that in the long-term, Iraq would be divided up to facilitate the Anglo-American military occupation. Fragments of a plan to fracture Iraq along ethnic and religious lines to facilitate control of the oil reserves and allow population control emerged in September 2002. Richard Perle, who then chaired the prominent Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Policy Board, issued a briefing for Pentagon officials that month. Ha¹aretz reported from a ³top official in the Israeli security services² that Perle: ³... showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratisation of the Middle East: Iraq a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia a strategic goal, and Egypt - the great prize. The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.² [Akiva Eldar, Perles of wisdom for the Feithful, Ha¹aretz,1 October 2002, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=214635] This outrageous idea advocates a fundamental reconfiguration of power across the Middle East, with a number of highly dubious parameters, including a greatly expanded Israel fully encompassing the Occupied Territories; the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan; and the incorporation of the Sunni areas of Iraq with Jordan to form a wider pro-US Sunni Arab Hashemite Kingdom. How influential was this plan? Extremely. According to the private American intelligence firm, Stratfor, the United States was ³working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.² The plan was ³authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney² as well as ³Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz², and was first discussed at ³an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July² that year. Now under this plan, Stratfor reported, Iraq would be de facto ethnically partitioned into three autonomous cantons: The central and largest part of Iraq that is populated by the Sunni Arabs would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shia Region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third state, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait. Why did Cheney and Wolfowitz, the architects of this postwar plan for Iraq in the Bush Cabinet, think this sort of partition would be a good idea? And did their plans have anything to do with facilitating Iraq¹s emergence as a democratic sovereign state? Not according to Stratfor, who outlined the advantages for the US as follows: ³First, the creation of a new pro-US kingdom under the half-British Abdullah [king of Jordan] would shift the balance of forces in the region heavily in the US favor. After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces. ³Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection -- and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.² [Stratfor, Uniting Jordan and Iraq Might Be Prime Post-War Strategy, 26 September 2002; Stratfor Press Release, ³US plan to merge Iraq, Jordan after war², 26 September 2002, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA209A.html; Gary D. Hallbert, ³US Considers Dividing Iraq into Three Separate States after Saddam is Gone², Forecasts & Trends, 1 October 2002, http://www.profutures.com/article.php/91/.] Yet none of this seems remotely interesting to John Ware who remains adamant, based on the reassurances from either ill-informed or unscrupulous American and British officials, that the allies were well and truly planless. It is not a coincidence, of course, that a few years later a large number of American politicians and security experts, not to mention the US Senate itself, began popping out of the woodwork, seemingly at random, all advocating that the best way forward for Iraq was to undergo partition. When this happened, the public was led to believe that the partition proposal was a radically new idea that could solve Iraq¹s entrenched problems. But we know that the partition lobby didn¹t come out of the blue at all. It was inspired directly by the original architects of the 2002 postwar plan, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. There is no conceivable way that such tripartite partitioning of an entire country could be achieved peacefully. Violence, conflict, civil war, along sectarian lines, would be inevitable if this was to be achieved. The task of ³eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state² by fracturing the country along ethnic and religious lines, in other words, was precisely the postwar strategy being explored by Dick Cheney as the most effective means of securing American control over the country, and the wider region. It is not simply some sort of accident of Anglo-American stupidity. Fostering Internal Conflict in Iraq It is no surprise then to find that at the core of the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq one consistently finds the involvement of the United States. Although systematically ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media, that US strategy has deliberately attempted to foster internal conflict between various Iraqi factions as a tool to consolidate the occupation has been officially acknowledged. In the November 2005 edition of the US Joint Special Operations University Report, Professor Thomas H. Henriken, a senior fellow at the US Joint Special Operations University and a former member of the US Army Science Board, reported that: ³The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to Œred-against-red¹ firefights (this color-coding derives from US training exercises, in which red designates enemy combatants and blue designates friendly forces). Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational levelŠ Events during fall 2004 within the central Iraqi city of Fallujah showcased the wily machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents. ... But Fallujah was hardly a unified camp‹the city seethed with internecine tensions. Zarqawi¹s strict Salafi beliefs clashed with the more moderate Sufi views of the Sunni residents. Additionally, the Zarqawi jihadis and nationalistic Fallujans disagreed over the use of terror tactics. Both wanted the Americans out of Fallujah and out of Iraq, but they differed on the methods.... Evidence of factional fighting between the residents came to light with nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces. US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists took advantage of the internal warring by tapping into Fallujans¹ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis. The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi¹s murderous activities‹and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters‹thereby diminishing his folk-hero image. Battles among anti-coalition forces killed enemy combatants and heightened factionalism. Thus, red-on-red battles enhanced the regular blue-on-red engagements by eliminating many insurgents.² [Thomas H. Henriken, ³The War: Divide et Impera², Hoover Digest, 2006, No. 1, http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/2904886.html.] I¹ve documented some of the evidence confirming a US strategy of tension in Iraq two years ago for Raw Story [here http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CAUGHT_RED__0923.html], and that evidence is still relevant now; I also updated it somewhat here [http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/08/four-frontal-war-covert-operations.html] and in the latter half of a piece put up earlier this year by Dissident Voice [here http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/07/whose-bombs/]. 9. from Conclusions The Hidden Holocaust--Our Civilizational Crisis PART 2: EXPORTING DEMOCRACY The ³hidden holocaust in history² thus continues now. It erupts directly from the unjust political and economic structure of the global system, and intensifies against target populations in the process of the system¹s attempts to expand and consolidate its interests and activities, to eliminate resistance to its rule. [...] "We¹ve knocked out their drinking water. Soon, they will begin to acquire diarrhea and malnutrition." General Schwarzkopf and poisonous imperialist-puppets Iraq will suffer from cholera for two years Aseel Kami Iraq will continue to suffer from cholera for the next two years until projects for providing sanitised water and a new sewage system are built, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday. "Since there is a defect in the infrastructure in providing sanitised water and in sewage, the problem of cholera will stay deep rooted," Adel Abdullah, general inspector in the Health Ministry, told a news conference. "Within two years there are ambitious projects to provide all Baghdad's districts with sanitised water in sufficient quantities and sewage projects. When these projects are complete, cholera will become history."... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=38897 A Microscopic Insurgent ... Cholera is a grave threat for the American project in Iraq, but also an opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of the population. The average Iraqi will feel truly secure only when the vicious disease-poverty-insurgent feedback loop is snapped. As we plan the post-surge phase of American operations, our leaders must bear in mind that healthy people make healthy decisions that serve as the bedrock for healthy societies. Mark D. Drapeau is a fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/opinion/04drapeau.html?th&emc=th US Holocaust Commission And Holocaust Denial By Dr Gideon Polya http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya010207.htm ...This US Resolution [ UN General Assembly] was an act of (a) gross dishonesty and (b) gross hypocrisy. Thus (a) the dishonest IMPLICATION was that Iran (not mentioned in the Resolution but mentioned in the US and Israeli UN speeches) has offended yet the Iranian delegate made it quite clear that Iran recognized the horror of the Jewish Holocaust and condemned the ³Genocide and immense sufferings associated with that horrific crime² (words of the Iranian delegate) (see: http://www.newsbull.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=40398 ); and (b) the US is actively involved in on-going Holocaust Commission in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan and, together with Israel, has been involved in obscene, public promotion of an Iranian Holocaust involving nuclear weapons. Conspicuously absent from the US Resolution were the ongoing 1990-2007 Iraqi Holocaust ( 2.6 million excess deaths and 3.7 million refugees so far); and the 2001-2007 Afghan Holocaust (2.2 million excess deaths and 3.7 million refugees so far) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11293/42/ , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11849/42/ , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12163/42/ and http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11968/42/ ) ... Not content with horrendous Holocaust Commission and Holocaust Denial in relation to the Iraqi Genocide (Iraqi Holocaust) and the Afghan Genocide (Afghan Holocaust), the US and its proxy Israel have both been threatening pre-emptive nuclear attack on peaceful, non-nuclear-armed, non-aggressive Iran (a Google search for the obscene phrase ³nuke Iran² and for the phrase ³Jewish Holocaust² today yielded about 0.3 million URLs in both cases) clear, unequivocal and horrifying Holocaust Promotion. It is not only the US that is involved in Holocaust Promotion, Holocaust Commission, Holocaust Ignoring and Holocaust Denial - the UK, Australia and their Coalition and NATO Allies are also involved in Holocaust Commission and Holocaust Denial in relation to both Afghanistan and Iraq (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11293/42/ ). Racist White Australia has been involved in all the US post-1950 Asian wars, is currently actively involved in the Iraqi Holocaust and the Afghan Holocaust and is in practical denial over the appalling, ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide (the annual death rate of Australian Aborigines, 2.2%, is similar to that of Australian sheep, 2.5%) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/10865/26/ ). Israel as a key partner in US-Israeli State Terrorism is involved in an ongoing Palestinian Genocide (post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million; 6 million Palestinian refugees; 3.5 million Occupied Palestinians held in abusive captivity for 40 years) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11409/42/ ). *** digest note: U.S. imperialism is globalized capitalism. It has dominated the world since it defeated and/or destroyed its rivals and enemies in imperialist world war 2. It's genocidal crimes against humanity have far surpassed those of the nazis. Facing a deep capitalist crisis and geostrategic rivalry from former -socialist now capitalist countries Russia & China, the U.S. instigated, with 911 the causus belli, another world war, the so-called permanent 'war against terrorism', to expand and secure unrivalled supremacy by controlling the world's major oil and energy resources, giving it the necessary power leverage over allies as well as enemies worldwide. It's fascist juggernaut has only deepened its crisis ... and its genocidal crimes in Palestine and Africa, and ongoing genocide against the indigenous people here, with its 'hidden holocaust' against the Black nation on whose backs and blood america fattened to expand globally its white supremacist 'manifest destiny' empire. The following pieces on New Orleans testify to several truths: "holocaust commission and holocaust denial" is still the fabric of the world's #1 enemy in its "homeland" as well as internationally; the ideological engine of racism fueling national oppression here is the major lynchpin of u.s. capitalism everywhere; fascism is as american as the proverbial apple pie. Katrina: Rich Folks' Opportunity, Our Dismal Failure Wednesday, 29 August 2007 by BAR executive editor Glen Ford synopsis Katrina laid bare the racism of the class that rules the United States. Their goal is to eliminate Black power in the great cities, to sweep the urban landscape clean for white habitation. The hurricane was a godsend for the corporate nation-planners, and they jumped to the opportunity to exile hundreds of thousands, and create the conditions that made return to New Orleans impossible. Apologists claim the fault lies in "incompetence." Bullshit. The Diaspora exists, so the killers of New Orleans have accomplished their goal. We have been collectively betrayed by assumed allies and a Black misleadership that is afraid to tackle capital. They want money, more than freedom. "Racism showed its ass in the days after August 29, 2005." August 29, 2005 is, to borrow President Franklin Roosevelt's characterization of Pearl Harbor, "a day that will live in infamy." But the aggression that brought a great Black city low was, unlike the Japanese attack of 1941, wholly home-grown, an obscene, riotous, racist assault on the Black presence in the United States, gleefully joined by virtually the entire business class, their think tanks, and the civil servants they put in office, Democrat and Republican. Even before the waters inundating New Orleans ebbed, the jubilation among the ruling class erupted in barely veiled celebration of nature-initiated "urban renewal" - erasing the homes and neighborhoods of hundreds of thousands of "problem people." What any decent person would see as a disaster, the racist ruling cabal viewed as a godsend. Within days of the deluge, corporate media were promulgating plans for a "new" New Orleans, one without a Black majority. The Louisiana Democratic Party - white-led but incapable of electoral existence without the Black voters who make up the majority of their ranks - proved as hostile to restoring the exiles of New Orleans as their Republican comrades. The fundamental contradictions of American racism, in which white folks cut off their own noses to spite Black faces, was acted out in dramatic, shameless theater. "Within days of the deluge, corporate media were promulgating plans for a "new" New Orleans, one without a Black majority. It soon became clear that national policy was to prevent the return of the New Orleans Diaspora, while directing the $100-plus billion dollars in federal "aid" to the region into the favored coffers of the Halliburton and Bechtel corporations - the same profiteers that got over like mad dogs in Iraq "reconstruction." A gangster regime revealed itself, on both foreign and domestic shores. The "liberal" line on Katrina is that it showed the abject "incompetence" of the Bush administration. That's the same analysis they bring to Iraq, which is described as a saga of fumbles and misjudgments by stupid people - rather than a premeditated crime that did not succeed. Barack Obama's opposition to the war is that it is a "dumb" war - not that it is bestial, immoral, and a violation of international law. In the same mind frame, critics of the administration's handling of the Katrina catastrophe pretend that stupidity reigned, rather than the patently evident plan to empty New Orleans of most of its Black population, permanently. Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back. The entirety of the last two years of federal and state actions in New Orleans has proven that the business class - the people who run this country - have a plan for a revitalized, "new" America, in which there will be no Black majority cities. Katrina was, for them, heaven-sent, "Negro-removal" on a massive and near-instantaneous scale. The other mostly Black cities will be emptied of the "problem people" by the attrition of gentrification, as capital invades. But the result will be the same - unless we resist. Our resistance has been stymied by a moribund and selfish Black misleadership class that is incapable of confronting capital. They like it too much. But they cling to power, promising that they can talk business out of its clear intention of yet again reshaping the nation to our detriment. Katrina showed that Black dispersal is the central goal of white capital, as they seek to "reconstruct" an America to their liking. "The Black misleadership class cling to power, promising that they can talk business out of its clear intention of yet again reshaping the nation to our detriment." Yet Katrina is also the touchstone experience of a whole generation of Black and non-Black people. They will never be the same, again. The venality of the business class, and the impotence of the Black misleadership class, has been amply revealed, and the youth will bear witness to the catastrophe, and the culprits, for the rest of their lives. Late-stage capitalism, which is raw theft and brigandage, showed its face while thousands drowned. Nothing can wipe out the crime. We are compelled by the gravity of the event that we call Katrina to rethink the Black Struggle, an unfinished project that people like Barack Obama want us to believe has already met its goals. Katrina proves otherwise. African Americans are the unwanted element of American society, as we have always been. The enemy has not changed, so why should we? He is not "race-neutral" - so why do we concoct, as Obama does, race-neutral arguments for social change? The enemy knows damn well who he wants to get the hell out of Dodge, or New Orleans, or Baltimore, or Newark. Racism showed its ass in the days after August 29, 2005. Nothing has changed. Never forget. Organize, with eyes wide open. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be reached at •••@••.•••. Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans By Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo 10 September 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_091005A.shtml How to Destroy an African-American City in Thirty-Three Steps Lessons from Katrina Wednesday, 04 July 2007 by Bill Quigley http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&... How can we destroy a Black city? - let us count the ways. Federal, state and local officials appear to have compiled a comprehensive list of destructive acts of commission and omission - and pursued every possible tactic to permanently de-Blacken New Orleans. The author is just as thorough in compiling a 33-count indictment of the city-killers, with the Bush Gang as chief conspirators. The crimes against Black New Orleans are so malevolent, so unremitting, and on such a grand scale, they cannot have been the result of mere incompetence. The crime is premeditated attempted murder... Bill Quigley is a civil and human rights lawyer and Professor of Law at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. You can reach Bill at •••@••.••• Six Months After Katrina: Who Was Left Behind Then and Who is Being Left Behind Now? By Bill Quigley ...The Katrina evacuation was totally self-help. If you had the resources, a car, money and a place to go, you left. Over one million people evacuated ...Twenty-seven percent of the people of New Orleans did not have access to a car. Government authorities knew in advance that ³ Š100,000 citizens of New Orleans did not have means of personal transportation.² Greyhound and Amtrak stopped service on the Saturday before the hurricane. These are people who did not have cars because they were poor - over 125,000 people, 27% of the people of New Orleans, lived below the very low federal poverty level befor Katrina. ... Who ended up in shelters? Over 270,000 evacuee started out in shelters. The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health surveyed 680 randomly selected adult evacuees in Houston shelters on September 10-12, 2005. The results of that survey illustrate who ended up in shelters: 64% were renters 55% did not have a car or a way to evacuate 22% had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave 72% had no insurance 68% had neither money in the bank nor a useable credit card 57% had total household incomes of less than $20,00 in prior year 76% had children under 18 with them in the shelter 77% had a high school education or less 93% were black 67% were employed full or part-time before the hurricane 52% had no health insurance 54% received their healthcare at the big public Charity Hospital The people who were left behind in Katrina were the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, children, and prisoners mostly African-American. Who is Being Left Behind Now? ³Hurricane Katrina likely made one of the poores areas of the country even poorerŠ.Both those who were poor before the storm and those who have become poor following the storm, are likely to face a particularly difficult time in reestablishing their lives, have few if any financial resources upon which to draw.² Congressional Research Service 2005 ... the same people who were left behind in the evacuation for Katrina are being left behind again in the reconstruction of New Orleans. In fact, now there are even more being left behind. .. Conclusion There is not a sign outside of New Orleans saying ³If you are poor, sick, elderly, disabled, children or African-American, you cannot return.² But there might as well be. The people left behind in the evacuation of New Orleans after Katrina are the same people left behind in rebuilding of New Orleans - the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, and children, mostly African-American. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb06/Quigley21.htm "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity." Former Chief Economist Milton Friedman, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal 3 months after Katrina Racist Genocide in New Orleans Continues: "Like 911 But Add Water" by liz burbank [edited article originally published 9/3/05 "A Catastrophic Success": A Holocaust Shaped by Race] Katrina was no accident, no surprise, no act of 'mother nature', the 'gods' , nor the result of 'bureaucratic incompetence' and 'poor communication'. The human and environmental and impact on New Orleans of a hurricane of this magnitude had been scientifically calculated. Rescue and recovery were deliberately withheld, working class Black people militarily imprisoned, forcibly dispersed and murdered by the armed state's violence. Katrina is a major intensification of America's historical genocide, a premeditated physical and psychological attack on the Black Nation, part of a strategy to destroy its strength, pride, cultural cohesion that has led in revolutionary resistance against this system in its deepest crisis.. A renaissance of Black resistance and leadership, historically the leading edge of revolutionary resistance in the U.S., is what the postmodern slavemasters fear could derail or give rise to a movement here in the 'homeland', in solidarity with international resistance, that could defeat its global "new world order" agenda . Thus Katrina and the brutal aftermath was engineered to serve the capitalist agenda in two interrelated ways: by uprooting, dispersing and destroying the Black Nation, while simultaneously inflaming reliable american racism and support for the consolidation of a fascist mode of state capitalism -- under the pretext of "rescue, relief and recovery² from a "major casualty-producing event" called a ³natural disaster.² [...] full article at http://lizburbankdigest.blogspot.com/2006/03/racist-genocide-in-new-orle... also at http://www.burbankdigest.com/] Post-Hurricane Katrina genocide revisited By Larry Chin Online Journal Associate Editor http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2388.shtml Two years ago, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into the southern Gulf coast of the United States, providing a convenient crisis for a criminal pillage of New Orleans, and militarization of the region.... Two years later, this holocaust remains fully in effect. New Orleans and neighboring areas have not been rebuilt or ³revitalized,² and remain (deliberately) without federal assistance. The hardest-hit areas that were left to rot remain devastated, its citizens still suffering, surviving only through the courageous work of local activists.... To commemorate the anniversary of the event, it is instructive to revisit some of the analysis and reporting from the immediate wake of Katrina, including the following: Hurricane Katrina and holocaust: Slow response or deliberate extermination? [...] New Orleans After 24 Months: "They wanted them poor niggers out of there..." By Greg Palast 09/01/07 "ICH" -- -- ³They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain¹t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that¹s just the bottom line.² It wasn¹t a pretty statement. But I wasn¹t looking for pretty. I¹d taken my investigative team to New Orleans to meet with Malik Rahim. Pretty isn¹t Malik¹s concern....Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing ³Blackwater² badges: ³Try to go into your home and we¹ll arrest you.² These aren¹t just any homes. They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter. Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood. Yet, two years later, there¹s still bars on the windows, the doors are welded shut and the residents banned from returning. On the first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing. Night was falling. What was wrong? ³They just messing all over us. Putting me out our own house. We come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the police there putting us out. Oh, no, this is not right. I¹m coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back. But they said they ain¹t letting nobody in. But where we gonna go at?² Idiot me, I asked, ³Where are you going to go tonight?² ³That¹s what I want to know, Mister. Where I¹m going to go - me and my kids?² With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into an apartment. The place was gorgeous. The cereal boxes still dry. This was Patricia¹s home. But we decided to get out before we got busted: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security¹s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it. Malik¹s organization, Common Ground, wouldn¹t wait for permission from the federal and local commissars to help folks return. They organized takeovers of public housing by the residents. And, in the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350 apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground across the Mississippi in the ward called, ³Algiers.² The tenants rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground the property in return for restoring it. Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public housing? Malik shook his dreds. ³They didn¹t want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there.² For Malik, the emphasis is on ³poor.²... It¹s the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem. So where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk (i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city: a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version of minstrel shows. Malik explained, ³It¹s two cities. You know? There¹s the city for the white and the rich. And there¹s another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that¹s for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They¹re going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven¹t recovered, there¹s nothing.² So where are they now? The sobbing woman and her kids are gone: back to Texas, or wherever. But they will not be allowed back into Lafitte. Ever. And Patricia Thomas? The middle-aged woman, worked sweeping up the vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke joint. Not much pay, no health insurance, of course. She died since we filmed her - in a city bereft of health care. New Orleans has closed all its public hospitals but for one ³charity² make-shift emergency ward in an abandoned department store. And the one bright star, Malik¹s housing project? The tenants¹ work was done this past December. By Christmastime, they received their eviction notices - and all were carried out of their rebuilt homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic resident who¹d lived in the Algiers building for decades. Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, ³Mission Accomplished.² MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED, NEW ORLEANS STILL FIGHTING BACK ... U.S./HUD Sends New Orleans Bulldozers and $400,000 Apartments for the Holidays By Bill Quigley t r u t h o u t | Report/Perspective http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_120307A.shtml On the 12th day before Christmas, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is planning to unleash teams of bulldozers to demolish thousands of low-income apartments in New Orleans. Despite Katrina causing the worst affordable housing crisis since the Civil War, HUD is spending $762 million in taxpayer funds to tear down over 4,600 public housing subsidized apartments and replace them with 744 similarly subsidized units - an 82 percent reduction. HUD is in charge and one HUD employee makes all the local housing authority decisions. HUD took over the local housing authority years ago - all decisions are made in Washington, DC. HUD plans to build an additional 1,000 market rate and tax credit units - which will still result in a net loss of 2,700 apartments to New Orleans - the remaining new apartments will cost an average of over $400,000 each Affordable housing is at a critical point along the Gulf Coast. Over 50,000 families still living in tiny FEMA trailers are being systematically forced out. Over 90,000 homeowners in Louisiana are still waiting to receive federal recovery funds from the Road Home. In New Orleans, hundreds of the estimated 12,000 homeless have taken up residence in small tents across the street from City Hall and under the I-10. In Mississippi, poor and working people are being displaced along the coast to allow casinos to expand and develop shipping and other commercial activities. Two dozen ministers criticized the exclusion of renters and low-income homeowners from post-Katrina assistance: "Sadly we must now bear witness to the reality that our Recovery Effort has failed to include a place at the table ... for our poor and vulnerable." The bulldozers have not torn down any buildings yet and New Orleans public housing residents vow to resist. "If you try to bulldoze our homes, we're going to fight," promised resident Sharon Jasper. "There's going to be a war in New Orleans." Resident resistance is being expanded by allies from a coalition of groups who see the destruction of public housing without one-for-one replacement harming all renters and low-income homeowners. Kali Akuno, of the Coalition to Stop Demolition, explains why many people who do not live in public housing are joining residents in this fight. "In the past two years, New Orleans has faced a series of social crises that have struck a blow to our collective vision for a more just and equitable city, not simply one that is more inviting to elites. Yet, none of these crises has been as uniquely urgent as this. What is at stake with the demolition of public housing in New Orleans is more than just the loss of housing units: it destroys any possibility for affordable housing in New Orleans for the foreseeable future. Without access to affordable housing, thousands of working class New Orleanians will be denied their human right to return." A federal court has refused to stop the scheduled demolitions. Residents offered evidence to show the three-story garden-style buildings were structurally sound, and pointed out the local housing authority itself documented it would cost much less to repair and retain the apartments than demolish and reconstruct a small fraction of them. The New York Times architecture critic described them as "low scale, narrow footprint and high quality construction." HUD promised to subject plans for demolition to 100 days of scrutiny - yet approved demolition with no public input in less than two days. The court acknowledged some questions about the fairness of the process but concluded that if the demolitions turn out to be illegal, residents can always recover money damages later.... Every one of the displaced families who were living in public housing is African-American. Most all are headed by mothers and grandmothers working low-wage jobs or disabled or retired. Thousands of children lived in the neighborhoods. Race, class and gender are unstated parts of every justification for demolition, especially the call for "mixed-income housing." If the demolitions are allowed to go forward, there will be mixed income housing - but the mix will not include over 80 percent of the people who lived there.... The demolition is poised to start in New Orleans any day now. Attempts at demolition will be met with just resistance. Whether that resistance is successful or not will determine not only the future of the working poor in New Orleans, but of working poor communities nationally and globally. If the US government is allowed to demolish thousands of much-needed affordable apartments of Katrina victims, what chance do others have? Digest note: The following NYT articles are good examples of despicably racist liberal - imperialist media misrepresentation and obfuscation that reinforce lies of federal 'incompetency', 'obliviousness' etc.,trivialize the horror and obscure the underlying causes and crimes. Mood Problems Prevalent After Katrina, Survey Find A new analysis finds that the delayed government response almost certainly made mood problems after the storm worse... Experts said the study was crucial to understanding where to direct resources after such catastrophes.The study was financed by the National Institute of Mental Health http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/research/04katr.html?th&emc=th New Orleans Hurt by Acute Rental Shortage NEW ORLEANS- Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard¹s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go. Sheletha Jones, left, Ramona Jones and Tariq Jones are trying to find housing after being told they must leave their FEMA trailer. About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors [digest: of the toxic, contaminated trailers]. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months. But few of them will be able to return to the city from which they were flooded out 27 months ago. More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city, threatening the recovery of the region and the well-being of many residents who decided to return against the odds. Before the storm, more than half of the city¹s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant. In core middle- and lower-income areas, blighted dwellings stretch for blocks on end... Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents. Ms. Bernard, a veteran worker for the local public transportation agency who has to move by Monday, has been scouring the city for a place to rent. Properties in her price range, if they exist at all, routinely come without finished walls or stoves. In New Orleans, decent affordable housing remains a casualty of the storm. ³A lot of the city is still boarded up,² said Ms. Bernard, who rented a one-bedroom house in eastern New Orleans for $300 a month before Hurricane Katrina. ³Where are we supposed to go?² One of the more striking new changes to appear in New Orleans is the highly visible number of homeless men and women living under bridges and in parks. Social service groups say about 12,000 [digest: at least twice as many according to volunteer workers there] homeless people are living in the city, about double the number before the storm. The sense of an impending housing crisis grew stronger last week with FEMA¹s announcement on Wednesday that it would close all the trailer camps it runs for victims of the 2005 hurricanes on varying schedules by the end of May. More than 900 families are living in FEMA trailer parks around the city. The agency said its action was intended to hasten the move of residents to permanent housing from trailers. It said counselors would assist every resident in the transition. ³We¹re with them every step of the way,² Diane L. W. Perry, a FEMA spokeswoman, said Wednesday. But in interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days. ³The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,² said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. ³I haven¹t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.² Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date ‹ or they were, in her words, ³rat holes.² Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills. ³We done been through so much with FEMA it¹s easy for the federal government to back out on their word,² Ms. Jones, a factory worker, said. ³They did it before. Everybody¹s looking at, ŒWhat if?¹ ² Time has already run out for some. Ms. Bernard, 40, and her two daughters got the final word on Friday that they were evicted, cast out of the only home they have had since the storm to whereabouts unknown. And they were not alone.³I don¹t know what¹s going to become of us,² said Tiffany Farbe, who lives in a trailer park near the Mississippi River in the Uptown part of New Orleans with her son and mother. ³They said get out. I¹ve explained to them over and over again our situation. FEMA just makes you feel like dirt.² The agency objects to that characterization, and says it is only trying to help. ³It¹s the next step in the recovery,² said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. ³It¹s the individual¹s responsibility to go out and find what¹s suitable for them.²... Before the hurricane, housing advocates estimated there were about 6,300 homeless people in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Today, the count is 12,000 and growing. Experts said it was hard to ignore the link between the housing situation and homelessness [digest:that is not a misprint] ³FEMA and the federal bureaucracy seem oblivious to the fact that virtually no new affordable rental housing has yet appeared in New Orleans to replace what was lost,² said Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, a group of 60 agencies that house and feed the homeless. ³It will take a long time for enough replacement affordable housing to be built. To withdraw housing assistance to the neediest people is a shirking of federal responsibility for the design failure of the federal levees in New Orleans, which was the cause of most of the destruction of affordable housing here.² In the past several months, a homeless encampment has sprung up on the steps of City Hall ‹ partly because it is a safe open space and partly because it is a political statement. Tents and sleeping bags are aligned in rows...Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. ³Ain¹t nothing left but the ground,² he said. ³We didn¹t have nowhere to go so we came here.² http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/us/nationalspecial/03renters.html?th=&... ==== an ugly history begging to be buried... "We are the ruling race of the world. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . He has marked us as his chosen people. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples." Senator Alfred Beveridge ³In brief, the U.S policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America¹s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change...² -Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997 "Manifest Destiny" The United States is not... is not fighting a ³war against terror.² In reality, what the United States leadership is doing, is fighting its own articulated war against the people and nations who had no animosity, nor any perceived capability to threaten the US as a global power...³ international terrorism is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media.² Remember, after the 9/11 attacks, the US official statements made no mention of involvement of the government or people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran in the accused list of the 9/11 perpetrators. In 1997, many leading architects of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), did include the name of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, PLO as selected targets to impose the American liberal democracy. It was a strategic stunt to inject the fear into people¹s mind... Emotional appeals to fear and to patriotism have led close to half of the population to accept unaccountable government in the name of ³the war on terrorism.² Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear: BBC documentary challenging the American version of the ³War on Terrorism² "...depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World." Henry Kissinger, National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974 ³We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.² David Rockefeller in a 1994 Statement to the United Nations Business Council towards a new world and future.. "My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?" Paul Robeson (1898-1976) - from testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956 "The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia." "... here in America the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are Œsuperior¹ in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white sub consciousness. Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism until they face some test then their racism emerges in one form or another." Malcolm X There isn¹t a war on terror. It¹s impossible for the world¹s greatest terrorist organisation - the United States - to conduct a war on terror... Since 1946, they¹ve overthrown some 50 governments, many of them by terrorist means - that¹s terrorism. from an interview with John Pilger: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14850.htm "The "civilized" have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the "civilized world"." James Baldwin COLLECTED ESSAYS (1998), ch. one "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976) € liz burbank's blog -- -------------------------------------------------------- Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?lists=newslog Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org How We the People can change the world: http://governourselves.blogspot.com/ Community Democracy Framework: http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Moderator: •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
