US: Crimes Against Humanity At Home and Abroad

US: Crimes Against Humanity At Home and Abroad

By Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko
Dissident Voice
August 17, 2020

This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia,
Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a
group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9
as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity.

Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb
dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki, Japan that came just three days
after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then Democratic
President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000
people on one day and turned right around and did it again in
Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings.

US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how
many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already
defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities
had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire
bombings.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an
exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the
arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent super power.

It also served as an example that the US would commit any
murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial
position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to
be true time and time again.


Even now in decline the US has never apologized for this
unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness
and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the
nations of the world.

Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency
when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima.

Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions
in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere
words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared
responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask
what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was
then, and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent
neoliberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to
develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the
benefit of their majorities.

In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits
a sliver of privileged society.

The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with
the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan.

As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly
H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American
as cherry pie.”

Since its inception the US has been ingrained with a motor force of
violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in
the way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement
to limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.

The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were
not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but
more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the
unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the
lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish
a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist
accumulation especially for the southern colonies.

At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population
consisted of Black slaves.

Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only
way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish
was to secede from the British Empire.

In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of
the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level
of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in
the inferiority of any race not white and Christian.

The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets of all the major cities
and towns of the US today are a resounding echo of resistance that
comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from
Africa.

The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime
wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God
to exercise their Manifest Destiny.

The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of
massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic
to the Pacific.

And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans
suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country
as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that
keep the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas
where there is not even running water.

On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations
bill, the biggest ever, and $2 billion more than last year.

The United States spends more on national defense than the next
11 largest militaries combined.

A well intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic
Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services
failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations
that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world
takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized
food programs.

Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are
struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example
of the growing social and health needs.

Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes
right down the drain.

It does not recycle through the economy; rather it is equipment
and operations meant to destroy and terrorize, and the only part
of it that is reused is the militarization of police forces in
the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars
at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.

When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war
in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction
of having had a war going every day of his 8 years in office.

He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and
Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of
death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its
twentieth year.

The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are
over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more
criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies,
aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into
endless wars, the intent of which is to make sure that a country
is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or
develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.

This, of course, is not the only type of criminal warfare in the
Empire’s arsenal.

Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity
as military attacks.

No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US orchestrated UN
sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the
deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of
sanctions on around one third of the countries of the world ranging
in severity starting with the 60 year old unilateral blockade of Cuba
for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away to
the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the
deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars
of their assets out of banks, and organizing coup plots against the
democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.

Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy
military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle
and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country,
barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize,
escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now
have been demanding real justice and equality.

The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to
confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science
based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation
of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal
police policy has exposed the system like never before.

The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that
now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change
will be the catalyst for real change to happen.

It will not come from a government that does not reflect their
interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in
a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home
and abroad, to become a thing of the past.

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-
home-and-abroad