Global ResearchA Terrible Normality: The Massacres and Aberrations of History
Through much of history the abnormal has been the norm
Through much of history the abnormal has been the norm.
This is a paradox to
which we should attend. Aberrations, so plentiful as to form a terrible
normality of their own, descend upon us with frightful consistency.
The number of massacres in
history, for instance, are almost more than we can record. There was
the New World holocaust, consisting of the extermination of indigenous
Native American peoples throughout the western hemisphere, extending
over four centuries or more, continuing into recent times in the Amazon
region.
There were the centuries of
heartless slavery in the Americas and elsewhere, followed by a full
century of lynch mob rule and Jim Crow segregation in the United States,
and today the numerous killings and incarcerations of Black youth by
law enforcement agencies.
Let us not forget the
extermination of some 200,000 Filipinos by the U.S. military at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the genocidal massacre of 1.5
million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and the mass killings of African
peoples by the western colonists, including the 63,000 Herero victims
in German Southwest Africa in 1904, and the brutalization and
enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo from the late 1880s until
emancipation in 1960—followed by years of neocolonial free-market
exploitation and repression in what was Mobutu’s Zaire.
French colonizers killed
some 150,000 Algerians. Later on, several million souls perished in
Angola and Mozambique along with an estimated five million in the
merciless region now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The twentieth century gave
us—among other horrors—more than sixteen million lost and twenty million
wounded or mutilated in World War I, followed by the estimated 62
million to 78 million killed in World War II, including some 24 million
Soviet military personnel and civilians, 5.8 million European Jews, and
taken together: several million Serbs, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and a
score of other nationalities.
In the decades after World
War II, many, if not most, massacres and wars have been openly or
covertly sponsored by the U.S. national security state. This includes
the two million or so left dead or missing in Vietnam, along with
250,000 Cambodians, 100,000 Laotians, and 58,000 Americans.
Today in much of Africa,
Central Asia, and the Middle East there are “smaller” wars, replete with
atrocities of all sorts. Central America, Colombia, Rwanda and other
places too numerous to list, suffered the massacres and death-squad
exterminations of hundreds of thousands, a constancy of violent horrors.
In Mexico a “war on drugs” has taken 70,000 lives with 8,000 missing.
There was the slaughter of
more than half a million socialistic or democratic nationalist
Indonesians by the U.S.-supported Indonesian military in 1965,
eventually followed by the extermination of 100,000 East Timorese by
that same U.S.-backed military.
Consider the 78-days of
NATO’s aerial destruction of Yugoslavia complete with depleted uranium,
and the bombings and invasion of Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Yemen,
Western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now the devastating war of attrition
brokered against Syria. And as I write (early 2013), the U.S.-sponsored
sanctions against Iran are seeding severe hardship for the civilian
population of that country.
All the above amounts to a
very incomplete listing of the world’s violent and ugly injustice. A
comprehensive inventory would fill volumes. How do we record the
countless other life-searing abuses: the many millions who survive wars
and massacres but remain forever broken in body and spirit, left to a
lifetime of suffering and pitiless privation, refugees without
sufficient food or medical supplies or water and sanitation services in
countries like Syria, Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Mali.
Think of the millions of
women and children around the world and across the centuries who have
been trafficked in unspeakable ways, and the millions upon millions
trapped in exploitative toil, be they slaves, indentured servants, or
underpaid laborers. The number of impoverished is now growing at a
faster rate than the world’s population. Add to that, the countless
acts of repression, incarceration, torture, and other criminal abuses
that beat upon the human spirit throughout the world day by day.
Let us not overlook the
ubiquitous corporate corruption and massive financial swindles, the
plundering of natural resources and industrial poisoning of whole
regions, the forceful dislocation of entire populations, the continuing
catastrophes of Chernobyl and Fukushima and other impending disasters
awaiting numerous aging nuclear reactors.
The world’s dreadful
aberrations are so commonplace and unrelenting that they lose their edge
and we become inured to the horror of it all. “Who today remembers the
Armenians?” Hitler is quoted as having said while plotting his “final
solution” for the Jews. Who today remembers the Iraqis and the death and
destruction done to them on a grand scale by the U.S. invasion of their
lands? William Blum reminds us that more than half the Iraq population
is either dead, wounded, traumatized, imprisoned, displaced, or exiled,
while their environment is saturated with depleted uranium (from U.S.
weaponry) inflicting horrific birth defects.
What is to be made of all
this? First, we must not ascribe these aberrations to happenstance,
innocent confusion, and unintended consequences. Nor should we believe
the usual rationales about spreading democracy, fighting terrorism,
providing humanitarian rescue, protecting U.S. national interests and
other such rallying cries promulgated by ruling elites and their
mouthpieces.
The repetitious patterns of
atrocity and violence are so persistent as to invite the suspicion that
they usually serve real interests; they are structural not incidental.
All this destruction and slaughter has greatly profited those
plutocrats who pursue economic expansion, resource acquisition,
territorial dominion, and financial accumulation.
Ruling interests are well
served by their superiority in firepower and striking force. Violence is
what we are talking about here, not just the wild and wanton type but
the persistent and well-organized kind. As a political resource,
violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for
the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain, while keeping
displaced laborers and other slaves in harness.
The plutocratic rulers find
it necessary to misuse or exterminate restive multitudes, to let them
starve while the fruits of their land and the sweat of their labor
enrich privileged coteries.
Thus we had a profit-driven
imperial rule that helped precipitate the great famine in northern
China, 1876-1879, resulting in the death of some thirteen million. At
about that same time the Madras famine in India took the lives of as
many as twelve million while the colonial forces grew ever richer. And
thirty years earlier, the great potato famine in Ireland led to about
one million deaths, with another desperate million emigrating from their
homeland. Nothing accidental about this: while the Irish starved, their
English landlords exported shiploads of Irish grain and livestock to
England and elsewhere at considerable profit to themselves.
These occurrences must be
seen as something more than just historic abnormalities floating
aimlessly in time and space, driven only by overweening impulse or
happenstance. It is not enough to condemn monstrous events and bad
times, we also must try to understand them. They must be contextualized
in the larger framework of historical social relations.
The dominant socio-economic
system today is free-market capitalism (in all its variations). Along
with its unrelenting imperial terrorism, free-market capitalism provides
“normal abnormalities” from within its own dynamic, creating scarcity
and maldistributed excess, filled with duplication, waste,
overproduction, frightening environmental destruction, and varieties of
financial crises, bringing swollen rewards to a select few and continual
hardship to multitudes.
Economic crises are not
exceptional; they are the standing operational mode of the capitalist
system. Once again, the irrational is the norm. Consider U.S.
free-market history: after the American Revolution, there were the
debtor rebellions of the late 1780s, the panic of 1792, the recession of
1809 (lasting several years), the panics of 1819 and 1837, and
recessions and crashes through much of the rest of that century. The
serious recession of 1893 continued for more than a decade.
After the industrial
underemployment of 1900 to 1915 came the agrarian depression of the
1920s—hidden behind what became known to us as “the Jazz Age,” followed
by a horrendous crash and the Great Depression of 1929-1942. All through
the twentieth century we had wars, recessions, inflation, labor
struggles, high unemployment—hardly a year that would be considered
“normal” in any pleasant sense. An extended normal period would itself
have been an abnormality. The free market is by design inherently
unstable in every aspect other than wealth accumulation for the select
few.
What we are witnessing is
not an irrational output from a basically rational society but the
converse: the “rational” (to be expected) output of a fundamentally
irrational system. Does this mean these horrors are inescapable? No,
they are not made of supernatural forces. They are produced by
plutocratic greed and deception.
So, if the aberrant is the
norm and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give
less attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars,
massacres and recessions help to increase capital concentration,
monopolize markets and natural resources, and destroy labor
organizations and popular transformative resistance.
The brutish vagaries of
plutocracy are not the product of particular personalities but of
systemic interests. President George W. Bush was ridiculed for misusing
words, but his empire-building and stripping of government services and
regulations revealed a keen devotion to ruling-class interests.
Likewise, President Barack Obama is not spineless. He is hypocritical
but not confused. He is (by his own description) an erstwhile “liberal
Republican,” or as I would put it, a faithful servant of corporate
America.
Our various leaders are
well informed, not deluded. They come from different regions and
different families, and have different personalities, yet they pursue
pretty much the same policies on behalf of the same plutocracy.
So it is not enough to
denounce atrocities and wars, we also must understand who propagates
them and who benefits. We have to ask why violence and deception are
constant ingredients.
Unintended consequences and
other oddities do arise in worldly affairs but we also must take
account of interest-driven rational intentions. More often than not, the
aberrations—be they wars, market crashes, famines, individual
assassinations or mass killings—take shape because those at the top are
pursuing gainful expropriation. Many may suffer and perish but somebody
somewhere is benefiting boundlessly.
Knowing your enemies and
what they are capable of doing is the first step toward effective
opposition. The world becomes less of a horrific puzzlement. We can
only resist these global (and local) perpetrators when we see who they
are and what they are doing to us and our sacred environment.
Democratic victories,
however small and partial they be, must be embraced. But the people must
not be satisfied with tinseled favors offered by smooth leaders. We
need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a
revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire’s heart
with the full force of democracy, the kind of irresistible upsurge that
seems to come from nowhere while carrying everything before it.
Michael Parenti’s most recent books are The Culture Struggle (2006), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), God and His Demons (2010), Democracy for the Few (9th ed. 2011), and The Face of Imperialism (2011). For further information about his work, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.
About the author:
Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.
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