Section One:
Presidents' Roles in Genocide
* The term genocide was first coined and defined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Holocaust, though there were many genocides before that. Lemkin's definition is pretty straight forward, listing the following elements:
* Attempted or Successful Destruction of a Nation, People, Culture, or Religious Group in Whole or in Part. The last phrase is very important. The genocidal do not have to exterminate an entire people to be guilty of genocide. One could also be guilty of genocide by deliberately seeking to wipe out a part of a people to make it easier to control the rest. Thus Hitler's orders to wipe out about one tenth of the Polish population constituted genocide against all Poles. All three US presidents in this section did not try to kill every last person of each group. But Nixon, Reagan, and Jackson did deliberately cause deaths of such a huge percentage of these groups, and planned the killings knowing full well the results, that what they did constitutes genocide.
* Mass Murder of Non-Combatants. Killing many soldiers is not genocide. By the same token, just because one side kills many soldiers in combat does not mean that also killing many civilians with the intent of wiping out all or a part of them is not genocide. Pointing to the fact that American Indians, Jews, Black slaves, or any other group fought back against genocide does not mean genocide did not happen. All three US presidents listed in this section approved the killings of these Cambodians, Guatemalans, and members of the Five Tribes, knowing full well these were virtually all civilians.
* Mass Rape or Rape as a War Tactic. Individual soldiers raping is not genocide. A policy in place ordering the use of mass rapes to intimidate a people, as Columbus did by rewarding his soldiers with Native women to rape, or Serbian soldiers and militias did against Bosnian Muslims, clearly is practicing an element of genocide.
* Starvation or Disease as a War Tactic. Famine and disease that often follows from war is not genocide. Deliberately using them to break the enemy is. Thus the deliberate mass killing of buffalo by
the US military to starve out American Indian tribes was an act of genocide, as was the use of diseased bodies by Hernan Cortes to contaminate Aztec water supplies. No doubt to the surprise of many, the US government never used diseased blankets to wipe out Natives. British General Lord Amherst did, as did American fur trappers to wipe out much of the Mandan tribe.
* Forced Sterilization. This must be a policy attempting to wipe out or diminish a group.
* Forced Adoption. Again, this must be a policy attempting to wipe out or diminish a group.
* Assault on or Disruption of Culture, Language, or Religion. This must be part of an attempt to weaken a group and make it easier to conquer. Thus US government assimilation efforts aimed at immigrants are not genocide. But assimilation efforts at Indian boarding schools run by both the Canadian and US governments were cultural genocide.
* Some versions of the definition of genocide insist the group under assault must be racial, ethnic, religious, or national. Such a definition would leave out Stalin's mass killing of at least twenty million Soviet peasants and dissidents. It would also leave out Mao's mass killing of tens of millions of Chinese dissidents.
* Even the Holocaust would be affected. The millions of political prisoners, handicapped, gays, and criminals executed by the Nazis side by side in the same death camps as Jews, Romany, Poles, and Jehovah's Witnesses suddenly become a separate class of victims. Clearly this is unconscionable, and not what Lemkin or any other human rights activist wants.
* For there is an enormous industry of genocide denial. The Holocaust, thankfully, has been recognized as such an egregious crime that only the most blind, ignorant, lunatic, or clearly bigoted would deny it happened or try to diminish the scope of the massive tragedy. But other genocides are not exempt. Hundreds of “scholars” and thousands of commentators, journalists, and government officials spend a great deal of effort denying certain genocides happened. The personalities doing so can be as horrific as the actual officials ordering the mass killings to as banal and ignorant as film and cultural critic Michael Medved, who denies that genocide took place against American Indians.
* Historian and psychologist Israel Charney formulated the most common psychological tricks that genocide deniers use, shown below in bold, followed by my comments:
Twelve Ways to Deny Genocide
* 1. Question the Numbers. Holocaust deniers sometimes focus on saying “only” five instead of six million Jews were killed. Deniers that genocide happened to Natives also try to claim the Americas were almost uninhabited before Europeans invaded, when actually there were as many as 140 million Natives in 1492. In what became the US, there were as many as 18 million.
* 2. Attack the Messengers. Accuse them of being radicals, fanatics, or liars. In both Nixon's and Reagan's cases, they and their administrations claimed their critics were dupes of Communists. Even Barry Gold water, the leading American conservative, was seen by Reagan as a Commie tool.
* 3. Claims the Deaths Were Accidents. Both Holocaust deniers and deniers of an American Indian genocide often claim disease did most or all of the killing. The second case ignores that Natives were more vulnerable to disease precisely because European and Anglo-American invaders used starvation as a war tactic. To be blunt, there is nothing as absurd as “accidental genocide” and it is offensive and illogical to claim so. Mass murder by definition is not accidental. Europeans, and later, white Americans, were guilty of genocide simply by choosing to travel to an area. Though they did not yet understand germ theory, they saw and understood the obvious result: their very presence brought deadly epidemics that killed many.
* Those why deny the slave trade was genocide often claim that since the goal was economic exploitation rather than killing all Africans, somehow it was not genocide. That ignores that the definition of genocide includes “in whole or in part.” For every one African enslaved, as many as six were killed. The massive scope of the killing of Africans under slavery makes it genocide by definition.
* 4. Focus on the “Strangeness” of the Victims. Dehumanize the victims. Focus on details like Orthodox Jewish victims' long beards, or take advantage of non-Natives' lack of knowledge about American Indians to portray their traditions as “savage.”
* 5. Blame “Tribal Conflict.” Claim the deaths were inevitable hatreds from longstanding conflict. But any deep study of history shows nothing was inevitable. The line between typical wars and outright genocide is clear and broad, and the first does not usually lead to the second. For every genocide, there are hundreds of wars.
* 6. Blame “Out of Control Forces.” This is much like the previous claim, except the guilty are not named. Instead, vague “forces” are blamed. This is a claim usually advanced by the sloppiest writers or public speakers seeking to confuse or capitalize on a public that may not know the history of a conflict.
* 7. Claim We Must Avoid Antagonizing the Killers. Sometimes this claim is very contemptible, that we must not anger the guilty. But often this claim is made by those hoping to end the violence.
* For example, in the case of genocide in Guatemala, as with many other dictatorships, those guilty of war crimes and repression insisted on a guarantee they would not be prosecuted in exchange for giving up power. At other times, people may want to avoid antagonizing mass killers because they rightly fear reprisals. It is not unusual for survivors, witnesses, and even prosecutors and judges to be assassinated.
* 8. Justify for Economic Reasons. Some years ago, conservative commentator Fred Barnes justified genocide against American Indians on the talk show The McLaughlin Group by saying (paraphrasing), “Who wouldn't prefer living in a big city to living in the woods?” Besides the fact that many do enjoy living in the countryside, Barnes' argument bought into another racist assumption, that Natives are or were lazy primitives and Europeans more productive and advanced, ignoring that technologically and in terms of economic activity, Aztecs and Incas both had a better record than Europeans. In fact, many Natives did live in cities larger than European ones, and virtually all Native societies provided for their poor better than the US does today.
* 9. Claim Victims Now Being Treated Well. Even if true, it is irrelevant to the crimes already committed. Similarly, a rape survivor's success in rebuilding her life after the assault does not mean the rape didn't happen.
* 10. Argue the Definition of Genocide. Argue the finest and most miniscule points to try and confuse the issue. Ironically, this is most often done by governments to avoid doing anything. The most bizarre and obvious example in recent years was the Clinton administration's insistence that Rwandan genocide was not genocide, only “acts of genocide.” Had they admitted genocide was going on, they would have been legally obligated to act, and politically pressured by the humanitarian concerns of the general public.
* 11. Blame the Victims. Accuse Jews of a conspiracy to control the world or Natives of being inherently warlike. Accuse Armenians or Kurds of being the cause of their own deaths or of being an internal threat to a nation by allegedly refusing to assimilate. Reagan repeatedly accuse Central Americans of being the real aggressors and threats to the US, despite the US invading first and these nations far too small and powerless to be a threat.
* 12. Say Forgiveness Is More Important. More than a few reconciliation campaigns, laws, or practices stress the importance of forgiveness. Most of the world's religions do as well. But the overwhelming majority of these practices, laws, and faiths do not use forgiveness as a reason to avoid justice and punishment, nor forget the horrors the victims suffered.
* Genocide as a term often gets abused, overused, or thrown as a political football. Anti-abortion activists at times use the term to support their cause, equating abortion to genocide. Gun rights activists often spread the false claim that Nazis favored gun control and thus blame gun control for genocide. (See Section Two.) Probably the most bizarre abuse of the term is when whites who claim distant Native ancestry complain it is “genocide” for them to be seen as whites.
* But ironically, the term is far more underused than overused. As said earlier, admitting that genocide is going on becomes the legal trigger for action by major world powers, as well as the United Nations. Admitting that atrocities are happening on the same level as the Holocaust naturally brings the concern of many world citizens. Since those who remember the Holocaust use “Never again!” as their call to action, admitting a genocide is being carried out and no one is stopping it brings much soul searching about the world's inaction and the inadequacies of governments, especially democracies.
* For more distant genocides, historical blindness and a tendency to glamorize American leaders, presidents especially, leads to denials. It is instructive that the one president that most historians admit committed genocide is the one most distant in time, Andrew Jackson. He also has the lowest body count of the three genocides by a factor of ten to thirty. No doubt some will object that all three presidents did not set out to commit genocide. Such a claim would also defend Stalin, who killed millions of farmers in the name of modernization. Most scholars in genocide studies and human rights activists argues that the sheer scope of mass civilian deaths can itself constitute genocide.
* That American presidents played central roles in two genocides very recently, within the lifetime of many of the readers of this book, begs the question: why didn't Americans try to stop either of these genocides? They both occurred well after the world's conscience supposedly had been enlightened by recognizing the horrors of the Holocaust.
* Both genocides happened in lands most Americans could not find on a map, in nations most Americans knew little about. Both genocides were carried out in the name of fighting Communism, though neither nation victimized was Communist. Both sets of wars, in Southeast Asia or Central America, did inspire many protests. That much is true.
* But the protests were overwhelmingly concerned with American lives. The chance of thousands more lost American lives apparently inspired more worry than the reality of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, and not white ones either, being killed by American weapons, money, and by either the order of or with the direct collaboration of American presidents. The American media's failure in covering both genocides is especially grievous, since neither wave of atrocities were recognized as genocide. In both cases they were deemed simply conflicts, ones blamed on Communists.
* Today, one of those guilty of collaborating with genocide, Reagan, remains one of the country's most popular presidents, revered as a godfather figure by conservative ideologists. Even moderate and supposedly liberal people sometimes concede him a great figure for allegedly winning the Cold War. (Most scholars outside of conservative ideologues disagree, rightly saying the Cold War was won by brave dissidents in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as Gorbachev's reforms.) For many, Reagan's personal charm matters more than his actions. His disarming smile let him literally get away with taking part in mass murder.
* Another president who ordered the mass deaths of civilians, Nixon, remains remembered for two matters, his corruption and his alleged competence in foreign affairs. To those who often call the Watergate Scandal a minor matter, one must agree. But not in the manner they might expect. Covering up spying, $15 million in bribes, burglary, and even plans to firebomb your opponents is not nearly as important as Nixon’s bombings that killed up to 600,000 innocents. And as will become clearer repeatedly throughout this book, Nixon and Kissinger's alleged skill at foreign policy is largely a myth.
* The two men were not only guilty of deliberate war crimes and causing immense suffering, they were both often staggeringly incompetent at foreign affairs. For when one's actions lead to the mass graves of innocent noncombatants, how much more of a bumbler can you be? And when these atrocities do not even lead to defeating the enemy and only make an ugly war into an even more horrific genocide? Seemingly, just proudly declaring you don't care about morality is enough to bedazzle many journalists and commentators, and even the less perceptive or moral historians, into thinking the two were foreign affairs geniuses.