American Barbarism
American Barbarism
by Larry Kerschner
Earlier this year news reports presented the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians as the work of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). These are clearly monstrous acts carried out by religious and political fanatics. However, I was struck by the morally self-righteous tone of many of the newscasts. Unstated was the idea that these are acts so evil that we Americans could never commit them.
Once again, Americans either don’t know or won’t acknowledge our history. American history is replete with similar instances of barbarity. African Americans have been raped, lynched and burned to death throughout the history of this country. Nearly 4,000 African Americans were victims of “racial terror lynching” in the South between 1877 and 1950, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative. In all, EJI documented 3,959 lynchings of black people in twelve Southern states, which are at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. More than half of the lynching victims were killed under accusation of committing murder or rape against white victims. The EJI says that racial hostility fed suspicion that the perpetrators of the crimes were black and the accusations were seldom scrutinized. “Of the hundreds of black people lynched under accusation of rape and murder, nearly all were killed without being legally convicted,” says the report. Most people think only of hanging, however lynching means much more. Lynching is the killing of African Americans or members of other racial minorities who were tortured, mutilated, burned, shot, dragged, or hung; accused of an alleged crime by a white mob; and deprived of their life without due process and equal protection of the law.
In a more recent form of lynching, a Black man, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered on June 7, 1998. Shawn Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John King, all White Supremacists, dragged Byrd for three miles behind a pick-up truck along a rural asphalt road. Byrd, who likely remained conscious throughout most of the ordeal, was killed when his body hit the edge of a culvert severing his right arm and head.
Lest you think this is ancient history, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) recently reported that at least 136 unarmed African Americans were killed by police, security guards and self-appointed vigilantes in the year of 2012 alone. Overall, one black person was killed in an extra-judicial shooting every 28 hours in this country.
Various estimates of the pre-contact Native population of the continental U.S. and Canada range from 1.8 to over 12 million. Over the next four centuries, their numbers were reduced to about 237,000 as the Indigenous Peoples were almost wiped out. Extermination of Natives started with Christopher Columbus’ arrival in San Salvador in 1492. Native population dropped dramatically over the next few decades. Some were directly murdered by Europeans. Others died indirectly as a result of contact with introduced diseases for which they had no resistance — mainly smallpox, influenza, and measles. Later European Christian invaders systematically murdered additional Indigenous People, from the Canadian Arctic to South America. They used warfare, death marches, forced relocation to barren lands, destruction of their main food supply — the Buffalo — and poisoning. Some Europeans actually shot at Indians for target practice.
Oppression continued into the 20th century, through actions by governments and religious organizations which systematically destroyed Native culture and religious heritage. The Indian Removal Act was passed by the US Congress on May 28, 1830, during the genocidal Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The Act set into motion a series of events which led to the “Trail of Tears” in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting in the destruction of most of the Cherokee population.” The concentration of American Indians in small geographic areas (reservations), and the scattering of them from their homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of associated military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life.
The discovery of gold in California, early in 1848, prompted American migration and expansion into the West. The greed of Americans for money and land was increased with the Homestead Act of 1862. In California and Texas there was blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians. In California, the decrease in Native population from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were an estimated forty million buffalo, but between 1830 and 1888 there was a rapid, systematic extermination culminating in the sudden slaughter of the only two remaining Plain herds. By around 1895, the formerly vast buffalo populations were practically extinct. The slaughter occurred because of the economic value of buffalo hides to Americans and because the animals were in the way of the rapidly westward expanding population. The end result was wide scale starvation and the social and cultural disintegration of many Plains tribes.
The great American hero George Armstrong Custer was known to attack Indian villages while they were asleep and killed many women and children during these attacks.
Burning people to death has an American history also. One of the most horrible mass human burnings ever recorded in human history was orchestrated by the US and Britain during World War II, when the decision was made to ignite hundreds of firestorms in the civilian city of Dresden, Germany. First Britain and the US carpet-bombed the city for 24 hours in an attempt to blow out all windows and doors, tear holes in buildings and take off rooftops and destroy water lines so fires could not be fought. After a short lull, they saturated the city with incendiary bombs designed to cause multiple fires, which then create massive firestorms. Those who survived ran to open places to escape being burned alive, but US fighter planes swooped in on the public parks where people had gathered and repeatedly strafed and killed those who had sought refuge.
For those not familiar with firestorms, huge intense fires demand oxygen, and the oxygen is sucked from the air creating horrific winds that pull and suck everything into the center of the firestorm. It feeds itself with oxygen being sucked in by hurricane-like winds. Intense temperatures of 1500 C degrees melted asphalt in the streets, and people trying to flee were stuck in the asphalt, and then completely incinerated. During the war in the Pacific similar attacks were carried out against the civilians living in Tokyo. Prior to this, the high altitude bombing attacks using general purpose bombs were thought to be not lethal enough by US Air Force leaders. Changing tactics to increase the damage, Gen. Curtis Lemay ordered the American bombers to drop incendiary bombs to burn Japan’s vulnerable wood-and-paper buildings. The first such raid was against Kobe on February 4, 1945. Tokyo was hit by incendiaries on February 25, 1945 when 174 B-29s flew a high altitude raid during daylight hours and destroyed around 643 acres of the city, using tons of mostly incendiaries with some fragmentation bombs.
On the night of March 9, 334 US B-29s dropped almost 2,000 tons of bombs on Tokyo, mostly 500-pound cluster bombs each of which released 38 napalm-carrying bomblets. Approximately 15.8 square miles of the city was destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died. This compares to the August 9 atomic bombing of the civilians in Hiroshima in which approximately 70,000 died immediately from the explosion and another 70,000 died from radiation within five years. For the follow up atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Nagasaki Prefectural Office put the figure for deaths alone at 87,000 with 70% of the city’s industrial zone destroyed.
Dr. Louis Fieser led a research team at Harvard which beat chemists from Du Pont and Standard Oil in a US government competition to develop napalm. On July 4, 1942, the first test of napalm occurred on the football field near the Harvard Business School. The first recorded strategic use of napalm incendiary bombs occurred in an attack by the US Air Force on the people of Berlin on March 6, 1944
The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
On May 13, 1953, jets from the U.S. Air Force’s 58 Fighter-Bomber Wing struck the Toksan Dam, near Pyongyang intentionally causing a massive flood. Floodwaters from the breached dam destroyed ten bridges, ruined several square miles of rice crops, flooded over 1,000 buildings and rendered the Sunan Airfield inoperable. In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew over a million sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm on the people of Korea. Estimates of the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, range from two to four million, and in the South alone, more than five million people were displaced.
In the course of the Vietnam War the US wholly embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, such as napalm and Dioxin Agent Orange, as an integral part of its arsenal. Many of us can remember the photo from Viet Nam of Kim Phuc the young naked nine year old girl running down the road after being burned horribly by napalm.
Reportedly 388,000 tons of U.S. napalm bombs were dropped on the people of Viet Nam between 1963 and 1973, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945.
Another American incendiary weapon used in hand grenades and artillery shells in Viet Nam is White Phosphorus, known in the military as “Willy Peter” (WP). White phosphorus, when exposed to air burns fiercely, can set cloth, fuel, ammunition and other combustibles on fire, causing serious burns or death.
On the second day of the first Gulf War a memo was sent from the Department of Defense to the Central Command of the Allied Military force attacking the people of Iraq. The memo stated that it was the intention of the US to destroy waste and water treatment plants and electrical generation plants “in order to cause epidemics of disease”. The belief of the US was that if daily life was made untenable for common people this would cause them to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The US military used WP extensively in the battle at Fallujah and other places in Iraq and Afghanistan but make the claim that the use is not illegal. Sometimes pieces of white phosphorus on the ground will burn for days, and it produces a heavy white smoke that is toxic to humans. There are reports of survivors whose wounds were treated and covered with bandages which re-ignited when bandages were removed.
The US has refused to sign the United Nation’s Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects. The convention covers landmines booby traps, incendiary weapons, blinding laser weapons. Protocol III of this convention prohibits WP or other incendiaries (like flamethrowers) against civilians or civilian objects and its use by air strikes against military targets located in a concentration of civilians. It also limits WP use by other means (such as mortars or direct fire from tanks) against military targets in a civilian area. Such targets have to be separated from civilian concentrations and “all feasible precautions” taken to avoid civilian casualties.
So while we can agree that many of the actions of ISIS are inhumane and barbarous, if we look honestly at American history we cannot condemn the actions of others from any place of moral superiority.