denial

tragedy of our time

antarchi — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:14:09 -0600

"I think it is one of the great tragedies of our time that so many people have died, so many people have been displaced and so many people face famine as a result of the events of Darfur."

Gordon Brown, September 2007

* * *

It is, most certainly. According to (that well-known trusted source) the BBC, 'Some 200,000 people have been killed and 2m displaced in Darfur since 2003.' The BBC devotes video, audio and textual reports accompanied by photos to the protests being held today, with the message 'don't look away'. Gordon Brown is played over and over again on the World Service, sounding sober and sympathetic, in control.

What a tragic contrast with the total lack of attention given last week to a new poll by ORB, a respected polling company used and normally quoted by the BBC. A google search for 'bbc iraq poll orb' brings up just 2 polls quoted by the BBC: one asked British parents whether they would be happy for their son to join the army, and the second asked whether British troops were winning or losing the war. But the ORB poll that asked Iraqi citizens how many of their household had died since the invasion as a result of the violence has been almost totally ignored, as far as I can see.

That poll, conducted in August of this year, suggests that there have been 1,220,580 Iraqi deaths since the invasion in 2003. That is over a million deaths since the already sanctions-crushed Iraqis were invaded by the world's greatest military power (and its poodle).

The figure of a million roughly tallies with an estimate from Just Foreign Policy, based on the Lancet study (last October) and 'a rate of increase derived from Iraq Body Count'. Just Foreign Policy also reckon the death count is just over a million: 1,044,607 (to date). And the figure also tallies roughly with an estimate by Gideon Polya, a scientist and writer, in February of this year. He too used the Lancet study as a basis, and estimated that by February 2006, there had been over a million victims as a result of the invasion. 600,000 of those needless deaths, he estimates, were children under 5.

If 200,000 deaths and 2 million displaced is one of the great tragedies, what is a million deaths (or more) and 4 million displaced? What is it when those deaths have come about as a result of a pre-planned invasion, built on fabricated reasons and a deliberate policy of false propaganda? What is it when the invading poodle, the British Ministry of Defence states publicly that it "does not maintain records that would enable a definitive number of [Iraqi] civilian fatalities to be recorded."? And what is it when the British media keeps silent about 1 million deaths, pointedly ignores them, and presents the man who wrote the cheques for war as sober, sympathetic, in control?

Well - what would it be, if it had been Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China or Iran who had invaded, unprovoked, through deceit, and for selfish gain, causing a million needless deaths?

* * *

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought."

Harold Pinter, from his Nobel Lecture 'Art, Truth and Politics'

unacknowledged genocides

antarchi — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 20:43:27 -0700

Genocide...

“...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

from The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Article 2

genocide inflation: kosovo

antarchi — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:08:07 -0700

[Genocide inflation] occurred before and during NATO’s 78-day bombing war on Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo. The pre-bombing propaganda barrage claiming Serb misbehavior was massive, and then during the war itself there was a stream of hysterical claims of indiscriminate killing, official U.S. claims of Bosnian Muslim deaths reaching 500,000, with a very profuse use of the word “genocide.” After the war, the claimed deaths quickly fell to 11,000, and one of the greatest forensic body searches in history produced only 4,000 bodies (with some 2,000 still reportedly missing).

Their existence must be terminated

antarchi — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:24:26 -0600

On 15 September 1915... Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

the threat of global warming is very real

antarchi — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:35:39 -0600

Nobel Laureate Henry Kendall, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “Let there be no doubt about the conclusions of the scientific community that the threat of global warming is very real and action is needed immediately. It is a grave error to believe that we can continue to procrastinate.” Shortly thereafter, ‘Hurricane Mitch’ wrecked Honduras, killing 11,000 people, in 1998. A year later, tens of thousands died in the ‘super cyclone’ that hit Orissa, India. In December 1999, 20,000 people were killed in Venezuela’s biblical floods, and many more in giant cyclones that have since struck Mozambique and Madagascar, with hundreds of thousands made homeless.

genocide in one small town

antarchi — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:05:52 -0700

the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 has survived as a now institutionalized “genocide.” But it has done so in the face of intractable problems: the NATO-organized and compliant Yugoslav Tribunal identified it as such by finding that there could be genocide in one small town, where the genocidists had bussed to safety all the women and children of their target population, and where the claims of 8,000 executed have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence of anything like this scale of killing. It lives on by virtue of its political utility and aggressive challenges to its truthfulness as “revisionism” and “denial.”

genocide denial: iraq

antarchi — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:30:38 -0700

The million Iraqi deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” of the 1990s is unmentioned in Samantha Power’s ludicrous treatise on genocide (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide), just as she fails to deal seriously with the Indonesian massacres in East Timor. The U.S.-coalition invasion-occupation of Iraq from 2003 has added another million to the Iraqi toll, but the idea that this is “genocide” is inexpressible in the U.S. mainstream media, which is focused on the more politically convenient killings in Darfur - attributable to a Western target, the Arab government of the Sudan, hence subject to the invidious word genocidal. This is implicit but real denial, which follows from the political basis of naming and concern.

an eyes-closed attitude

antarchi — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:09:48 -0700

The temptation is to think that it will be enough to show people the crimes and terrible injustices that are being done around the world, and they will be so appalled that they will try to act to put a stop to them. The temptation is to think that they will be particularly keen to act, particularly active even, when the crimes are being carried out with their support - conscious or unconscious, active or passive.

But it is not enough. Most people (in the comfy west) don't want their comfy lives disrupting. Most people don't have time or space to have their lives disrupted, particularly not for people who are miles away, a different colour, and whom they will never need to see. Disruption is particularly unappealing if it needs to happen from the roots and if it takes away the comforts we have become accustomed to, the comforts that make our lives tolerable, and the comforts that we have won at the expense of those whose lives are now intolerable.

So - rather than be troubled night and day by thoughts that we contribute to the misery of other people round the world, we close our eyes. We have to close our eyes, because the troubled thoughts would overpower us otherwise, would make our comfy lives intolerable. So the choice becomes a comfy life which is intolerable; a less comfy life - which we would find it hard to tolerate; or else an eyes-closed attitude.

But if you have your eyes closed, you have to close your eyes to the fact that they are closed, or else the troubled thoughts come back to view. An eyes-closed attitude needs to be undertaken with an eyes closed attitude. We mustn't know that we are only managing to continue living comfy lives by shutting out the troubled thoughts that might destroy them.

Emperors in denial

antarchi — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 20:48:58 -0600

ah those Emperors! They of course will never admit to being naked themselves. They will find every sort of fig leaf to wave in front of their private parts, assuring us all (and themselves) that these have been woven out of the most rare, delicate and sympathetic threads. And of course ordinary people want to believe that they have been witness to the delicate threads of Emperors... so they will bow down before them, feeling the nudity, nodding their heads at the seeming transparency of the threads.

"non-existence"

antarchi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 23:20:50 -0700

So... even the BBC (even!) now believes things not because the evidence points towards it, but because others believe it, or don't believe it.

Dear Ms Keen... We put the word "genocide" in inverted commas in this case because there is an international dispute about whether the killings were in fact genocide.

It doesn't even have to be driven by fear: it is just the line of least resistance, the default option.

Find me an international issue that is not in dispute. They think they are offending no-one by not committing themselves to a categorical answer. But a non-categorical answer to an issue that is categorically undisputed by anyone who has bothered to look at the evidence is not just offensive, it is wrong; and it is also judgemental - which is the very thing they think they are avoiding.

Imagine...

We put the word "Shakespeare" in inverted commas because there are some people who think he did not really exist

We put the word "democracy" in inverted commas because there are some people who think it does not apply to the United Kingdom

We put the word "sincerity" in inverted commas because some countries believe that Tony Blair has none of it...

We at the BBC strive, incidentally, to provide "fair", "accurate" and "well-researched" "reporting" in all our "news" bulletins and we do not take sides on issues that might be thought to be controversial, like whether or not "George Bush" exists.