Why Do We Side With The Genocide Sides? Plus
Jaysus, JD! Plus music
Jaysus, JD!
As everybody and their confirmed bachelor uncle has now remarked, in the space of about a week one of America’s slimiest politicians ever has 1) failed to move the needle in the U.S. attempt to keep Hungary’s autocracy bro, Viktor Orbán, in office, and 2) committed a failed drive-by “negotiation” with Iran in Islamabad, and 3) at least temporarily alienated every regime official whose support he would need to capture the 2028 Republican presidential nomination—including the top official, assuming that guy is still alive, maintains the limited command of his faculties he has now, and is not attempting to usurp another term when 2028 rolls around.
On the Iran matter, one could see Vance’s hand in last week’s hilarious anonymous quotes and assessments provided to various newspapers as he headed to Islamabad, depicting him as the only regime official with the gravitas (!) and anti-war credibility to pull off a successful negotiation with the wily Iranians.
Credibility and J.D. Vance are mutually exclusive and he launched an aggressive campaign to prove that quite a while ago. The newsies are the only people who turned a blind eye to it. Sadly, that doesn’t mean he can’t win the GOP nomination, just as Harris’s miserable performances in 2020 and 2024 don’t knock her out of contention on the Democratic side.
Why Do We Side With The Genocide Sides?
And speaking of Harris, Democratic partisans have recently resurrected their vicious slanders against people who may have refused to vote for her because she refused to renounce her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The notion that refusing to vote for someone who supports genocide is somehow a worse sin than materially supporting the genocide is confounding, as is the notion that the anti-genocide voters, or non-voters, bear more responsibility for Harris losing than she does for sticking to her and Israel’s guns.
(All she had to do was denounce genocide. How fucking hard is that? Oh but she might have lost had she taken a stand against it and alienated the pro-genocide crowd.)
It’s confounding, that is, until you look at U.S. history and see that committing, supporting, or ignoring genocide has never, ever been a deal-breaker, and in reality it probably wasn’t for Harris—a crappy candidate in 2020 and little better in 2024 when she suffered the additional handicap of Biden’s profound dumbfuckery—either.
Every US president who has held office since yr. faithful correspondent has been politically aware, beginning with Lyndon Johnson, arguably abetted, precipitated, or ignored genocide. It’s almost as much a rite of passage as a president’s first attack on another country.
Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal—which was not in any way official, one has to note—concluded in 1967 that U.S. conduct in Vietnam under Johnson, including the use of chemical weapons, the deliberate targeting of civilians based in part on their suspected political tendencies, and other elements of the conflict, met the definition not just of war crimes, on which almost everyone is agreed, but of genocide as well.
That conclusion is hotly disputed by Vietnam war apologists and by critics who think the finding erodes the meaning of genocide, but of course some of those critics are among the accused and others are among those who would like their own armies to enjoy the freedom of action that the U.S. claimed in Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger escalated all of those behaviors when they assumed control of the war, and they carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia—definitely war crimes, possibly genocide and certainly a precipitating factor in the Khmer Rouge-led genocide in Cambodia. They also armed and supported Pakistan as that country committed genocide in Bangladesh.
The Ford administration denounced what it knew of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, but at the same time supported, along with Australia, Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor under the dictator Suharto. Jimmy Carter, the first human rights president, inherited and maintained our genocide-tolerant Indonesia policy. To his credit, he did end U.S. support for Guatemala’s military regime because of their human rights violations, a scruple to which his successor took offense.
That successor of course is Ronald Reagan, the first Bircher-American president, who expanded US support for Suharto in part because he admired the dictator’s policy of slaughtering Indonesian communists. His administration raised “concerns” about the East Timor genocide, but they weren’t concerned enough to pull military aid or curtail diplomatic relations—he hosted Suharto at the White House and praised him lavishly while appointing a senior U.S. diplomat as ambassador to Indonesia.
Reagan also restored military and diplomatic support for the Guatemalan regime during that country’s civil war, again on anti-communist (hence pro-capital) grounds. Despite the ongoing genocide against the country’s indigenous peoples, the Reaganites pretended to believe that the human rights situation there had improved since Carter suspended aid.
George H.W. Bush got two separate bites at the genocide apple, first as the CIA director under Gerald Ford after Ford and Kissinger green-lighted the East Timor genocide, and again as president when he led the destruction of much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and imposed crippling sanctions that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under Bush and his equally sanctions-happy successor, Bill Clinton.
This is to say nothing of Bush’s support for Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war initiated by Iraq—and which support the Iranians still begrudge—and during which the Iraqis used chemical weapons which may have been manufactured using materials exported by the U.S., and conventional weapons purchased with illegal loans facilitated by the Bush administration, which underlay the scandal that became known as Iraq-Gate, which earned then-attorney general Bill Barr his “Cover-up General” sobriquet from former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist Bill Safire.
This is also not to mention Bush’s decision to allow Saddam the opportunity to put down the Kurdish uprising, encouraged by his administration, that followed the first Gulf War. Saddam was intent on committing a genocide—intent isn’t definitive but it matters—and the U.S. permitted the helicopter attacks which unleashed chemical and other weapons against Kurdish and Shia Muslim opponents of the regime.
A thousand points of white phosphorous light.
Clinton, as noted, continued and ramped up the sanctions policies that took such a toll on Iraq’s children, an outcome which Clinton’s top diplomat, Madeleine Albright, famously described as “worth it.”
Sanctions are an act of war primarily aimed at civilians, but the killing of hundreds of thousands of children isn’t considered a genocide by most people. The genocide that indisputably did occur on Clinton’s watch was the one in Rwanda. Although his administration was aware little more than two weeks after the the killings began that the campaign had escalated into a full-on genocide, senior officials including Clinton decided not to call it what it was because they thought they would be forced to intervene if they named it.
The Bush fils regime denounced the Darfur genocide early on, in the person of Colin Powell, but concluded that the Genocide Convention didn’t require them to act on it—the opposite of the conclusion that motivated Clinton’s Rwanda shrug—and in any event Powell’s and the regime’s international credibility in general was already shot at that point.
On the opposite end of the Bush regime’s genocidal continuum, their destruction of society in Iraq and the broader region enabled the growth of ISIS, who committed genocide against the Yazidi people and other religious, ethnic and cultural groups in Iraq and Syria.
The Bushies blame the Obamans for not forestalling the ISIS genocides by fixing the apocalypse Bush had wrought—if only Obama had not drawn down the US presence in Iraq, they say, ISIS would never have achieved the power and growth which gave them the capacity to commit genocide.
That’s obvious buck-passing bullshit, but it doesn’t mean that Obama’s hands are clean. Setting aside anything he might have done to better mitigate the ISIS genocides and see to their surviving victims, and setting aside his refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, and setting aside the horrors he unleashed on the Libyan people, he committed the U.S. directly, for fun and profit, to the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen.
Any objections Trump might have to genocide would be purely transactional—does it cost him money? does it wound his pride?—and he happily maintained US support for the one in Yemen. Most people are not real to him. That’s true of all presidents to a greater or lesser degree—Bill Clinton felt your anger, for instance, not your pain; Ronald Reagan saw a vast, avaricious blob where the most vulnerable among us lived—but Trump’s world only has a handful of people in it who actually matter in some way.
Everybody else is prey. You can see it in the dehumanizing language he aims at anyone he thinks is lesser than he is. Hence the ethnic cleansing program, which could easily culminate in genocide if he saw it as profitable and risk-free.
Biden, to his credit, if you actually want to give him credit for not helping the Saudis slaughter people, ended the country’s overt support for the genocide in Yemen but then enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? Trump of course has continued our support for the Gaza genocide and come up with his own ideas for improving on it, and as we all know, he has threatened genocide in Iran and may well carry it out if he thinks that’s the way to combat his ED.
This is all exclusive of the 300 or so years prior during which Americans were merrily committing genocides at home and abroad and paying no price for it. Tradition!
Music
Goldie Boutilier, “King of Possibilities”
Big Thief, “Los Angeles”
freak slug, “Honest Man”
Boyish, “Jumbos”
Laufey, “From The Start”
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Take care, be well.
I remember, in the 80s, asking rhetorically why we were always on the side of the guys murdering nuns.
It's hard for me to understand why, fifty years later, there are still "Vietnam war apologists." I knew people who were there, not a single person that I knew who spent actual time in Vietnam ever thought that there was a good reason for it. Now, of course, they're allies and trading partners, I mean, insofar as we have any allies and trading partners left.
As far as understanding that we're the Genocide Country--I find that liquor helps me quash that understanding. Also, I watch a lot of birds, and also, read books and magazines about said birds. All better than thinking about the truth.