In denial ?

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, Johannes, you wrote:

But for me holocaust means almost total, planned and intended physical
extermination of a whole people. I do not see this happeining in Iraq at the
moment.

A few questions for you to consider:

1) Was the "whole Jewish people" exterminated in the Nazi holocaust, yes or
no ?
2) Was the sale of poison gas and materials to manufacture it to Iraq, plus
military hardware, plus consultancy to Hussein by the West, planned or not
planned ?
3) Was the assistance of the US government to Hussein in coming to power and
maintaining that power planned or unplanned ?
4) Was the strategy to be used in the Gulf War, and the specific weaponry
used, planned, yes or no ?
5) Was the decision not to strike at Baghdad in 1991 (removing Hussein,
which Wolfowitz wanted) and abandon the military campaign, a premeditated
decision or not, and why exactly was it made ?
6) Were the sanctions imposed and maintained by majority vote by the United
Nations on Iraq planned or not planned ?
7) Was the rejection of policy alternatives proposed by many people in
relation to Iraq planned or unplanned ?

You can make arguments that most people in the West did not wish for the
physical extermination of the Iraqi people, but the point is that what their
governments did actually had that effect. In the same way, most German
people did not wish for the extermination of the jewish people, gypsies,
homo's, communists, schizophrenics and so on, and that the Nazi government
struggled a lot with the question of how they could get rid of these
impurities, but the official policies adopted did have this effect.

You can argue that I am being emotionalist or propagandist in styling the
deaths in Iraq a "holocaust" and introduce subtle distinctions between
direct war casualties, deaths due to the deteriorating health and food
situation, deaths due to incarceration and torture and so forth, and blame
it all on Saddam Hussein and his regime in abstraction of the total context.

What I am trying to say is that, just as with everything else, the morality
of Western intervention is projected in the future - not just "wir haben
dass nicht gewusst" but also "we cannot know yet what the morality of the
intervention was, only history will tell us and absolve us". The possibility
of calculating deaths attributable to war and economic blockade accurately
is simply denied.

If you do the demographic research you can calculate the annual number of
deaths of infants, and women giving birth, in Iraq. Many kids die before
they can even talk, so there is no story from them. I am calling it a
holocaust now, and not waiting for the future to prove me correct. If I am
wrong, okay I am wrong, but I dare to say it and make that argument, and I
am actually glad the German Government opposed the US intervention, at least
somebody showed sense.

The problem is that in the Western demonisation of Hussein, the entire
pattern of Western intervention in Iraq over many years is conveniently
hidden, just as Zionists spirit away e.g. the gigantic number of German and
Russian deaths in world war two, and just as Western scholars spirit away
Western business support for Hitler and the imperialist character of the
Nazi regime, such that Nazism just appears a psychopathic abberation due to
the unsolved mysteries of human psychology.

Jurriaan










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