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Blacksburg To Baghdad:
US Mass Murder At Home & Abroad

By Gideon Polya

23 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org

The World has been appalled by another senseless mass killing in America, this time on the beautiful Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech - 32 mostly young students gunned down by a deranged killer who then killed himself. The Korean killer Cho had been found medically to be dangerously deranged but not sufficiently so as to preclude automatic gun ownership in Virginia (see: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/america/20tech.php ).

However this further American Massacre has to be seen in the wider context of US history from the first English colonial settlement in Jamestown, Virginia (1607) and thence from Independence in 1776 to the present. America’s history has been a bloody story of sustained racism, violence and genocide.

Between First Settlement and 1776 the English settlers engaged in occupation, dispossession and mass murder of the Indigenous Indians, the killing mechanisms involving dispossession (and thence starvation), guns and even biological warfare (e.g. use of smallpox-carrying blankets to spread disease among the Indian population) (see: Chalk, F. & Jonassohn, K. (1990), The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses and Case Studies (Yale University Press, New Haven)).

While American propaganda gives US Independence in 1776 as a victory for the Enlightenment and Democracy, the cruel reality was that independence from England gave the Americans carte blanche to invade Indian lands to the West (prohibited at the time by the English for complex diplomatic and strategic reasons, as I have confirmed in recent discussion with an eminent American History scholar). The genocide of the American Indians followed inexorably from the immediate post-1776 movement westward, through Jackson’s 1830 “Indian Removal Act” to remove Indians from lands east of the Mississippi, the conquest of the Plains and thence the final decimation of the Pacific coast Indians (see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html ).

The genocide continued with the conquest of Hawaii (1898), American Samoa (1899) and former Spanish colonies from the Caribbean to the Philippines (where the 1899-1902 Philippines War cost 1 million Filipino lives). In the 20th century American imperialism dominated Latin America and in the post-1950 era left a bloody footprint in Africa (backing civil wars) and in Asia, where the post-1950 US Asian Wars have been associated (so far) with 19 million excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen).

Most of this appalling carnage has been swept under the carpet. The American people are notorious for their ignorance of world geography (in my experience some thinking that my home state of Tasmania is somewhere in Africa or that Australia might be in Central Europe through confusion with Tanzania and Austria, respectively). Yet America acts as though it owns the world. Indeed the carnage of US imperialism and US “democratic imperialism” ( democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism) will be exceeded by Climate Genocide due to American Climate Criminals. America is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, and like Australia (the big country with the highest annual per capita carbon dioxide pollution and the world’s biggest coal exporter), refuses to sign Kyoto and refuses to constrain carbon dioxide pollution. The Bush-ite American and Bush-ite Australian Climate Criminals are threatening the world (especially deltaic Africa and Asia) with Climate Genocide and indeed threatening the Planet with Terracide.

The past and present US mass murder and genocide is largely un-reported by lying, racist, genocide-ignoring Mainstream media and Racist Bush-ite (RB) America (and its lackey Racist White Australia) are ruled by régimes locked into denial over the seriousness of global warming. That US mass murder continues today at home and abroad can fundamentally be explained in part by the dictum “history ignored yields history repeated”. The Mainstream media coverage of the appalling Blacksburg Massacre (33 deaths in total including that of the perpetrator) contrasts with failure of Mainstream media to report that on the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq the post-invasion excess deaths totaled 1 million (see Countercurrents: http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya220307.htm ).

Thus inspection of the UNICEF website (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iraq.html ) reveals that in Occupied Iraq about 122,000 under-5 year old infants are dying every year (2005 figures). Comparison with other countries indicates that about 90% of this carnage is avoidable and thus 110,000 under-5 year old Iraqi infants are dying avoidably under US occupation each year – evidence of gross American violation of the Geneva Convention that demands that Occupiers do everything in their power to keep their Conquered Subjects – and especially Children - ALIVE (see Articles 38, 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y4gcpcp.htm ).

The carnage of American-imposed passive mass murder of 110,000 Iraqi infants annually is better understood in a shorter time frame – it corresponds to the Americans killing about 300 Iraqi infants daily or about one every 5 minutes. However America is occupying a swathe of impoverished countries across the world either through its own forces (in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan) or through US-armed and US-backed surrogates (as in Occupied Haiti, Occupied Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territory). The “under-5 infant deaths” (90% avoidable) in the Occupied Iraq and Afghan Territories alone total 0.5 million per year i.e. 1,300 daily and one per minute – un-reported by racist, ;lying Mainstream media but an awful truth that is only several mouse clicks away on the UNICEF website.

Australia in 1994 already had annual gun-related deaths five times lower than in the US. After the Port Arthur Massacre (Tasmania, April 1996) subsequent stringent Australian gun control laws halved the annual gun-related deaths (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/14010/42/ ). The intransigent pro-Gun, pro-War, pro-Violence Bush-ite American culture has a prime responsibility for the Blacksburg Massacre together with lying, racist Mainstream media. Madman Cho pulled the trigger, but the pro-Gun Lobby, the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bushites and the pro-Bush Racist Zionists (RZs) are responsible for a Bush Administration that permits madmen to mass murder at home and abroad.

The Blacksburg Massacre was enabled because America is awash with guns, has a power-obsessed, abusive and racist culture and IGNORES the appalling human consequences of its actions.

Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently editing a completed book on global avoidable mortality (numerous articles on this matter can be found by a simple Google search for "Gideon Polya" and on his websites: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/ , http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html , http://gpolya.newsvine.com/ and http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ). As a radical alternative to dispassionate scientific analysis on behalf of humanity, he has painted some huge paintings demanding respect for Woman and Mother and Child: Sydney Madonna: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/10865/26/ ,
Manhattan Madonna: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/10766/26/ , Melbourne Madonna: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/13950/254/ , Truelove: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11031/254/ and Qana: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/9547/26/ .



 

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