NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9588

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From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: "Politically Correct Holocausts"
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From: Philip Feeley <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Herman

POLITICALLY CORRECT HOLOCAUSTS
by Edward Herman, Z Magazine, April 1992, p. 54-57

    The concept of "political correctness," as used by the main-stream
media and pundits, has wide applicability.  It comprises ideas and claims
that challenge established ("really correct" [RC]) thought and behavior,
and are pressed on mainstream individuals and institutions by minorities
and other outsiders.  There is politically correct (PC) language and
deportment, but also politically correct history and even politically
correct conspiracies.  For example, that the assassination of JFK was
carried out by more than one person is PC, and thus has been subjected to
indignant repudiation by the dominant media.  By contrast, that the
shooting of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981 was a plot
hatched by the KGB and Bulgarians was an RC conspiracy, that Newsweek,
NBC-TV, and the New York Times accepted enthusiastically despite the
absence of any credible evidence.

PC And RC Holocausts
    There is also a sharp distinction between holocausts that
establishment recognizes and finds deserving of attention and indignation,
and those that mainstreamers ignore but which are deemed worthy of
attention by marginalized people and "extremists." The former, which are
RC, may be illustrated by the case of Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot, or
the "Final Solution" under Hitler (although only in retrospect, not at the
time of the killing, as described below).  Those that are of little
interest to the establishment, and which can be classed as PC, may be
illustrated by the slaughter of over a million Armenians by the Turks in
1915, and the decimation of the East Timorese population by the Indonesian
army form 1975 onward.
    There is obviously a close correlation between the "worthiness" of
the victims as perceived by the Western establishment and the recognition
of the holocaust.  As the West was built in good part on the destruction
and exploitation of colonial peoples and on a slave system, the associated
victims are hardly likely to be "worthy" or the holocausts RC for dominant
westerners.  Such holocausts are an embarrassment as well as painfully at
odds with myth structures of the West.
    It also seems likely that the differentiation between PC and RC
holocausts will fit the schema of dividing bloodbaths into those that are
Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious (as used in Chomsky and Herman, *The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism*).  In this classification
system, Constructive bloodbaths are those associated with political
changes seen as advantageous to Western political interests.  They may be
carried out by ourselves (Vietnam), or by an ally of factions within a
foreign state (Indonesia in 1965-69).  Benign bloodbaths are those carried
out by Western client states that, while not necessarily helpful, are
treated with indulgence and understanding (East Timor, invaded and
occupied by Indonesia; South Africa beating up everybody in sight in its
neighborhood in the 1980s).  Nefarious bloodbaths are those carried out by
enemy states.  The hypothesis is that there will be great indignation and
channeled benevolence in the last case, whereas for constructive or Benign
bloodbaths there will be a combination of rationalization and eye
aversion.  Only the holocausts associated with Nefarious bloodbaths will
be RC--the others will be PC.

    PC As Myth Deconstruction
    One function of PC (and multiculturalism) is clearly myth
deconstruction.  This is dramatically evident in the new revisionist
evaluation of Columbus.  The conventional-traditional view has been that
Columbus was a visionary, a brave pioneer who "discovered America" and
thus opened up the New World to the West, yielding a benevolent influx of
precious metals to Europe, emigration to freedom, and progress.  In the
traditional view the discovery was an uncontaminated triumph.  Hans
Koning writes in *Columbus:  His Enterprise* (p. 125), that "It may exist
somewhere , but I have not found one grade school or high school book
that does not treat Columbus as the great hero he was not."
    The revisionist and PC view looks at Columbus' enterprise from the
standpoint of the victimized non-white populations "being discovered," the
greed, ruthlessness and genocidal racism and policies of the erstwhile
"heroes," the cooperative role in this enterprise of the Christian churches,
and the mass death and degradation that followed.  Columbus, who initially
described the Arawak Indians of Hispaniola as gentle and friendly, soon
wrote to Spain that "From here, in the name of the Blessed Trinity, we can
send all the slaves that can be sold...for these people are totally unskilled in
arms."  He introduced gold quotas for the Indians, and maltreatment and
disease reduced the Indian population of the island from 125-500,000 in
1492 to 10,000 in 1515.
    The further advance of the Spanish into the New World took a
similar toll elsewhere.  The population of Mexico went from perhaps 25
million in 1519 to 6.3 million in 1548; in Peru the population declined from
7 million in 1519 to 1.8 million in 1580.  A large fraction died from disease,
but many were killed or died from overwork combined with widespread
demoralization that led to alcoholism and suicides.

    The North American Indians:  A PC Holocaust
    The North American Indian population fell from some 12-18
million before "discovery" to 300-400,000 in 1900, a better than 95 percent
decline.  Official and scholarly estimates up to recent decades maintained
that pre-contact Indian numbers were between 500,000 and 1.5 million, in
accord with the vision of North America as "unoccupied" and
underutilized, till the takeover by the progressive Christian civilization of
Europe.  (See the excellent account  of the history of demographic
estimates by Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Ryan, Jr. in M. Annette Jaimes,
ed., *The State of Native America:  Genocide, Colonization and
Resistance, Boston:  South End Press, 1992.)  A large fraction of North
American Indian casualties was from newly imported diseases, but large
numbers were killed by numerous massacres by the ruthless, merciless,
profoundly racist, but technologically advanced, Christian barbarians.  (In a
characteristic Orwellian inversion by the powerful, the victimized natives
were the cruel and "merciless  savages," as expressed even in the U.S.
constitution.)  If not killed outright, the Indians were regularly forcibly
removed from their lands and the basis for their livelihood and way of life
deliberately destroyed.  (General Phil Sheridan exterminated an estimated
60 million buffalo in the 1870s "in order to deny a basis for subsistence to
the Cheyenne, Lakot and other peoples of the Great Plains.")  There were
19th century acknowledgments of a policy of "complete extermination,"
and the Republic of Texas offered a cash bounty for Indian scalps.  U.S.
policy and practice merits well Ward Churchill's comparison with the
operations of the German SS.
    But this was *US* in action, the bloodbath was constructive, so
that this is not RC and is treated with brevity and evasiveness in
mainstream textbooks, allowing the occupation of the continent by *US*
to be a triumph of good people building a new North American order.

    PC And The Slave Trade
    PC holocausts usually involve the slaughter of people of color, who
have regularly been the victims of western exploitation and violence.  Their
role makes them victims of constructive of benign bloodbaths, hence
unworthy, and hence not RC.  The PC-RC dichotomization parallels
contemporary usage in the application of the word terrorism.  For example,
the apartheid government of South Africa was never a "terrorist state" (or
naked aggressor) in western government-expert-media representations in
the 1980s although it was responsible for the death of over one million
black Africans in that decade.
    Earlier, the slave trade produced one of the great holocausts in
human history, but as the West did the victimizing this is only a PC, not an
RC, holocaust.  With the virtual extermination of the native populations of
the New World, and the discovery of the enormous profitability of slave
labor in raising sugar, "the market"--in combination with state organized
and protected terrorism that seized, transported, and sold slaves--gave new
life to human slavery and the slave trade from the fifteenth century onward.
Later, it was found that tobacco and cotton could also be profitably
cultivated using slave labor, and the reach of slavery was extended and
persisted till the latter part of the 19th century.
    Roger Anstey and J. E. Inikori estimate that some 12 million slaves
were seized and shipped to the New World between 1451 and 1870.  But
the conditions of the trade were so horrendous that it is estimated that 48
million were taken, with 36 million dying en route, yielding the net transfer
of 12 million.  As L. S. Stavrianos describes it in *Global Rift* (p. 109):
"The 36 million casualties were sustained in the course of the overland
march from the interior to the coast, and then during the dreaded overseas
"middle passage" to the New World.  Inhuman crowding, stifling heat and
poor food resulted in appalling mortality rates during the ocean crossing.
Maize and water once every 24 hours was the standard diet.  If the slaves
refused to eat they were lashed and, if that failed, hot irons were used to
force them to eat.  When epidemics broke out, as they often did under the
foul conditions, the sick slaves were drowned in order to prevent infection
from spreading.  Sometimes the slaves jumped overboard rather than
endure the misery.  Indeed, this became so common that nets were fixed all
around the decks in order to prevent suicides."
    This holocaust served dominant western interests and was
institutionalized and participated in by all the great powers of the West.
Their commercial elites built fortunes and respectability on the basis of this
business, either directly in trading slaves or indirectly in supplying
provisions for the slavers or exporting the sugar and molasses, and later the
tobacco and cotton.  Accounts of the history of the great powers stress the
economic importance of the sugar-cotton-tobacco economy to the West,
but the human cost is mentioned only in passing if at all.  For example,
Richard Cobban, a liberal historian of France, notes the great importance of
the West Indies in French trade and prosperity in the 18th century, and he
castigates Louis XVI's foreign policy for failing to give sufficient
protection to French interests in the West Indies, which he says "were
worth fighting for" (*A History of Modern France*, vol. 1).  The condition
of the slaves and the morality of slavery and the slave trade, so crucial to
West Indies economics, are addressed in a single parenthetical statement:
"(its morality [the slave trade] as yet is barely the subject of discussion)."
    In brief, slavery and the slave trade are normalized, given their
importance in western economy and institutions.  And being normalized
they can hardly constitute an RC holocaust.

    "The Final Solution":  From PC to RC
    Western attitudes toward specific holocausts may change over time.
This can be illustrated by the evolution of western responses to Hitler's
policy of exterminating the European Jews in the 1940s.  At the time this
policy began, the position of the Jews in the West was tenuous and their
leaders were fearful and cautious.  Anti-Semitism was deeply embedded in
Western elite cultures.  As a result the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi death
camps was not given great attention or credence by the mainstream media.
As Deborah Lipstadt has shown, it was mainly in the dissident media like
*The Nation* and PM (a long defunct liberal-left New York newspaper)
that the issue was treated as of first order importance.  In the New York
Times and most of the mainstream media, reports of the killing of hundreds
of thousands of Jews were put on the back pages, often next to the comics
(see the final chapter of Lipstadt's book, *Beyond Belief*).
    It was only after the war that attention to and indignation at the
Final Solution became intense.  No doubt this was partly because of fresh
disclosures, but the lag in disclosure and the treatment of the substantial
and horrifying evidence known earlier remain to be explained. The later
attention and stress were associated with the growth in affluence,
confidence and power of Jewish communities in the United States and
other great western powers, and the increasing importance of Israel as a
U.S. surrogate in the Middle East. In short, Jews became worthy victims in
retrospect, and the Final Solution became an RC holocaust after the fact.
The murder by the Nazis of hundreds of thousands of gypsies, who
continue to be a marginalized people, remains only a PC holocaust.  (In
*Congress Weekly*, a publication of the American Jewish congress, the
well-know Zionist academic Edward Alexander has referred to the charges
of a Nazi genocide against homosexuals and gypsies as an "exploded
fiction."  At a meeting in Jerusalem of the World Congress of Jewish
Studies, Professor Henry Guttenberg referred to the "real or *supposed
genocide* of Armenians, homosexuals, Gypsies and American Indians."
These denials of other and competing holocausts by spokespersons for
those that are RC constitute a form of apologetics for the nazis and other
perpetrators of mass murders that are mere "fictions.")

    Vietnam War:  A PC Holocaust
    The U.S. attack on Vietnam was one of the great holocausts of our
time, but as it was perpetrated by the United States it is not only not an RC
holocaust, the U.S. is portrayed as a kind of victim of an unappreciative
Vietnamese people.  In the "beyond chutzpah" and absolute nuthouse
phase, the moral issue of the war turns on the Vietnamese treatment of our
MIAs/POWs!
    The arrogant bullies who ran the United States after World War II
refused the Vietnamese people the right of self-determination for 30 years,
because this was incompatible with western control.  We and the British
supported French colonization from 1945-54; we then refused to abide by
the Geneva Accords of 1954 and allow unification of Vietnam by free
elections.  It was well known then and later that the great majority of
Vietnamese, in the southern as well as northern parts of the country,
supported Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists.  The United
States therefore simply ignored the Geneva Accords, the rights of the
Vietnamese to self-rule, and the UN Charter, and imposed its own
imported dictator on South Vietnam.
    When this didn't work, in 1962 the Kennedy administration began
pouring in helicopters and thousands of "advisers," and managed a vicious
counter-insurgency war, which included using chemical warfare to destroy
peasant crops as well as concentration camps for peasants (called "strategic
hamlets").  When this also didn't work, Lyndon Johnson fabricated a "Bay
of Tonkin" attack by the North Vietnamese, and began a massive invasion
of South Vietnam in 1965.  All through the early 1960s, U.S. officials
fought strenuously against any political settlement that would terminate
complete domination of the South by a U.S.-controlled faction, despite the
general acknowledgment that this faction had no substantial political
support within the south.
    What followed was one of the most vicious and cowardly wars in
history.  The greatest military power on earth, with the most advanced
technological arsenal, deployed its full power against a poor peasant
society without aircraft or modern technological base.  It virtually leveled
Indochina with millions of tons of bombs, rained napalm and fragmentation
bombs on hundreds of peasant villages in the South that were without
medical facilities, and used dioxin-based Agent Orange in a massive
program of destruction of forests and crops (Operation Ranch Hand, the
planes called Providers, one cute line of our aviators being "Only you can
prevent a forest").  Vast areas of South Vietnam--being saved from
"aggression"--were made "free fire zones" and many thousands of peasants
were shot in the course of military operations and just for fun "skunk
hunts."
    The 500,000 man U.S. invasion force was supplemented by
mercenaries from within South Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and
Australia to "pacify" the country.  These troops carried out merciless
"search and destroy" operations in which domestic animals and crops were
destroyed, villages burned down, and large numbers of men, women and
children killed or turned into homeless refugees.  It was found that the
"enemy" had deep roots in the population of South Vietnam, so the people
were treated as an enemy population.  Prisoners taken in peasant villages
were systematically tortured to obtain information (in violation of
international law), and were regularly killed, often by the mercenary forces
but under U.S. tutelage.
    The final roll in Indochina will never be known, and it continues to
grow as thousands have died since 1975 from the delayed setting off of
some of the millions of unexploded bombs still littering the ground.  But
the number dead may run as high as four million, and numbers injured and
traumatized also run into the millions.  The number of victims of Agent
Orange is large, but of no interest to the West.  The land ravaged in the
chemical war of virtual ecocide may never recover.
    As a victim of U.S. actions, the Indochinese catastrophe cannot be
an RC holocaust (although Pol Pot's lesser killings in Cambodia are).
Because of U.S. power, the strength of its anticommunist ideology, and the
conformism of its ideological institutions, the murderous U.S. attack has
always been treated as, at worst, a "tragic error."  In RC thought, the
United States was never engaged in aggression in Vietnam (this would be
an oxymoron); its *right* to smash a peasant society by the most cruel and
vile means was never called into question, nor were the policies ever called
by their right names.  Liberals like Anthony Lewis and Stanley Karnow
contended that we were overreaching in our efforts to do good.  Karnow in
1988 was still writing that we allowed the *Vietnamese people* to depend
to much on us.
    In saying this, Karnow was equating "Vietnamese" with our
puppets and mercenaries--the people who successfully fought against us
and the population we attacked were reduced to non-people.  And, in fact,
the crucial element in U.S. perspectives on Vietnam has always been the
"mere gook rule."  The "slopes," "dinks," "gooks"--small, poor, non-white
peasants--who failed to accept our dictates had and have no moral standing
(any more than Iraqi victims).  We had a right to determine who ruled that
distant country.  If the population refused to accede, we had a perfect right
to slaughter them.  This was the underlying imperialist-racist morality of
the Vietnam War, which persists today.

    MIAs-POWs:  Beyond Chutzpah
    The great preoccupation of the U.S. media and establishment with
MIAs and POWs dates from 1969, when Richard Nixon latched on to this
issue to stall settlement of the Vietnam War.  He was successful, and even
after the war the rightwing found this a useful means of preventing
normalization of relations with Vietnam (as described by H. Bruce
Franklin, *M.I.A. or Myth-Making In America*).
    That this lunatic endeavor should have worked, and that the status
of MIAs and POWs (U.S. of course--the status of Vietnamese MIAs has
never arisen) has become the great "moral issue" of the post Vietnam war
era, is a product of a racist nut house.  As Franklin shows, there never were
many POWs and Vietnam returned all of them it could be expected to
account for on schedule.  Nixon's trick, of course, led to a lot more fighting
and the deaths of many more U.S. military personnel than the prior total of
MIAs and POWs.  The hypocrisy in the pretended concern over the welfare
of U.S. military personnel is also shown by the treatment of Vietnam
veterans after their return to the Big PX--they became non-persons, the
government struggling to prevent their collecting money for Agent Orange
damage, and the vastly more numerous veterans "Missing in America" than
Missing in Action being of no interest to the leaders of the nut house.
    The Indochinese victims, of course, present no moral issue at all.  It
is not admitted or of any interest that the United States killed and wounded
millions of innocent people and virtually destroyed Indochina in an
unprovoked, vicious and cowardly aggression.  These are mere gooks,
who, in addition, had the temerity to stand in our way and even shoot at
our armed forces occupying their country!  In the RC model, we were
"protecting South Vietnam" from aggression, expending our resources to
save the Vietnamese and allow them democracy and self-determination,
etc.  Thus we are guilty of nothing and have no moral obligation for
damages--but this perspective is achieved by a rewriting of history that
makes Stalinist accounts of the role of Leon Trotsky look straightforward
by comparison, and by moral insensitivity without limit.  The spectacle of
elevating our few POWs, who were instruments of a cowardly aggression
that victimized millions, to the status of martyrs and victims of somebody
else's pernicious behavior, all built on a system of lies and hypocrisy, is the
final touch that carries us Beyond Chutzpah.


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