by Evert Cilliers aka Evert Eden
When it comes to evil, nobody beats Hitler. He committed the biggest mass murder of innocent humans in all of history.
Six million Jews, and that’s not even mentioning all the people who died because Hitler started the Second World War.
But Hitler is not the only mass murderer in human history: there’s Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
And then there’s us. The people of America.
Often given to calling America the greatest country on earth, we’ve had a very recent example in which we ourselves committed mass murder. President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cabinet of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others, persuaded our noble American nation to go to war against Iraq and mass-murder a million and a half innocent Iraqi women and children.
Just like Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and the rest persuaded the Germans to kill Jews, Russians, French, and Brits.
This Iraqi civilian mass murder was our hysterical reaction to the terrorists killing over three-thousand of us on 9/11, a tragedy which we commemorated this past week.
A million and a half innocents. We bombed and shot them to smithereens.
So heck, if you dare to call yourself human, don’t be too hard on Hitler and Germany to the exclusion of ourselves.
We Americans have committed one of the mightiest big mass murders since Hitler’s Germany (let’s forget for a moment what we did in Vietnam and Cambodia). Our Iraqi mass murder stacks up nicely with the other two big mass murders since Hitler: the mass murder of Cambodians by Pol Pot, and the Rwanda massacre of eight-hundred thousand Tsutsis by the Hutus.
The Hutus did it with machetes ordered from China, and we Americans did it with “our troops” ordered from the Pentagon.
America is as guilty of killing innocent Iraqis as Hitler is guilty of killing innocent Jews.
Then, in the blindness of our guilt, we’re always happy to say to any Iraq war veteran, “thank you for you service,” and regard this pathetic mass murderer as some kind of hero.
Not that “our troops” are the real guilty folks: the people who sent them to war are the palpable evil: the President and his cabinet and the generals in the Pentagon.
Our troops were merely their machetes.
But imagine saying to these machetes: “Thank you for your service.”
Shouldn’t we Americans rather say to our Iraq War veterans: “We apologize for turning you into mass murderers of innocent women and children”?
Shouldn’t we Americans examine ourselves and ask why we committed such a mass murder? And to this day, why we don’t feel guilty about it at all?
What makes us Americans better than Hitler or Germany?
Hitler and Germany killed six million Jews and, by starting the Second World War, caused the death of sixty million people, including twenty million Russians; five million Poles; French, Brits and Americans half a million each; and eight million of the Germans themselves.
So yes, the Germans caused the deaths of far more humans than America did. But a million and a half dead Iraqi women and children are not small potatoes.
Nazi leaders were tried at the Nuremberg trials and executed, and the German nation itself has gone through hoops of self-examination (in school, German children learn about the Holocaust that their forefathers committed). Germany has paid millions in reparations to the Jewish State of Israel. And Germans have finally turned themselves into a successful and admired democracy after all the great evil they’ve done.
What have we Americans done after the evil we committed in Iraq?
Nothing.
No Nuremberg trial for George W. Bush. He’s not even shunned by polite society.
True, he and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the others cannot travel overseas for fear of being arrested and hauled in front of the Hague for their Nuremberg reckoning with justice.
But nobody in America has prosecuted them for their war crimes. Neither have we as a nation paid reparations to the Iraqi families whose mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and sisters and brothers we’ve murdered.
The German nation has tried to atone for their sins. Not the American nation. In fact, our mass murder doesn’t bother us one bit.
So who is the more noble nation: America or Germany? Who is the greater nation?
What right do Americans have to call ourselves the greatest country on earth?
Just asking.
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BTW, fun facts from the October Harper’s Index:
Number of paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence that were censored by Facebook in July as hate speech: 5
Minimum number of foreign electoral interventions conducted from 1990 to 2000 by the United States: 18 By Russia: 3