Kyle Davidson

Down and out Press, First edition June 2022

America's Silent Genocide

“You are failing us, But young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you, and if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. Greta Thunberg

I am sitting in a courtroom looking up at a judge facing the immense and incomparable power of the United States Government; My state-appointed attorney looks on unconcerned as my young child is about to be turned into a check for a federal policing agency. During the 1960s, part of the white American proletariat aligned with anti-war and civil rights issues; these problematic people were labeled hippies. Because of my dreadlocks, off-grid farm, and anti-authoritarian principles, my house was labeled neglectful in caring for my child. In reality, I made my family an easy target for the corporate vultures and state entities to systematically and ethically justify profit from our poverty. The U.S. Health and Human Services have deemed itself responsible for poverty in the United States. This includes migrant children. Every migrant child the state takes into federal custody costs at least 775$ per night or 282,000$ a year (Ainsley). These children are forced to sleep on the floors of cells, kidnapped, and kept prisoner with fewer amenities than a murderer would receive. Why is this acceptable? My son had love, a good life, a home I built, schooling, and food; he wasn't being abused. How could the government justify the imprisonment of children or tear families apart? Because it represents a significant source of income for local child welfare agencies and corporations like Lock Heed Martin.

The Health and Human Services Department legally kidnaps these children based on race, country of origin, income, or lifestyle and turns them into profit for the private sector. Tragically there are even darker truths Military-Industrial-Complex and companies like Lockheed-Martin wish to bury. With endless profit to be made, there is no end to the suffering of those most need help. The question is, then, what can be done when a lifestyle of civil disobedience is met with war, policing, genocide, and propaganda. From our home in the U.S. to nearly every part of the world politicians and corporations like Lockheed Martin have made trillions in profits off of the deaths of innocent people. As I will reveal in this paper, it is incredibly challenging to establish the extent of the damage caused by corporate interests, and American politicians. The incomparable suffering alone and the damage caused by U.S.-backed regime change, coup attempts, and endless wars in other regions of the world. As the question of how much How many civilian deaths can be attributed to United States' economic interests in the Middle East? What is the cost in life, not the financial burden that the media so often covers? How many children die as a result of U.S. government-sponsored genocide?

"In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S.forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique;over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq; over 60,000 in El Salvador;30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000);35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile;and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire,Turkey,and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust."

― Michael Parenti;Yale Univerity (PhD)

Conveniently for Lockheed Martin and other private interests, the U.S. military is not required to report civilian casualties. Rather than admit to the horrors the American Military Industrial-Complex calls into existence, it portrays itself as a beacon of freedom. Because of this egotistical belief in American space entire world suffers; From endless wars, tariffs, and treaties that favor U.S. private interests. How could anyone justify this immense suffering inflicted upon the world to feed the endless vampiric thirst of those in power? According to the "Geneva Convention" a treaty signed in 1951 to prevent war and genocide, genocide is defined as:
"Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" (United Nations). All of these criteria are met by the U.S. wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. The trauma inflicted upon the world is so immeasurable that one can not cover it in a simple essay. Thus in this essay, I will specifically address the conflicts in the Middle East. To date, the post-9/11 wars on terror have cost "14trillion dollars" (Hartung 1) and "7,000 American Lives"(Crawford 1). This fiscal cost and the number of U.S. soldiers killed are often the only mentions of the wars. What about the cost to Afghanistan's children? Why do the American people entrust the welfare of their children to the same corporate entities that profit off the murder of children? How could the U.S., the world's freest country, start a war with a nation of children? Throughout history, tyranny and genocide have come from one source: power, its tools of the trade, authoritarianism, and economics. Once a government has decided to kidnap, murder, or enslave an individual for-profit, nothing can stop it short of mass organization and civil disobedience by the many it seeks to victimize.

“We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?”

Emma Goldman. Address to the Jury, delivered 9 July 1917, New York

“The U.S. military is not required to report civilian casualties. Rather than admit to the horrors the American Military Industrial-Complex calls into existence, it portrays itself as a beacon of freedom.”

Despite the tragedy of my sons' kidnapping to feed monstrous machine that is U.S bureaucracy, there remains even darker components of the American capitalist and governmental merger. From Hiroshima to Afghanistan, the U.S. weapons of war fail to distinguish between a combatant and a family home, a hospital, a school, a civilian, or a child. According to the United Nations, 42% of Afghanistan's population is children ages 0-14.(U.N.)" The civilian causalities in the Middle east likely follow that of the "500,000 civilians killed (Crawford)" 42% of those in Afghanistan were children. It means that of the "6million displaced refugees (Vine)" running from Afghanistan since 9/11 40% are also children(Kaufman). In a nation of 38million, one in 5 people are displaced due to U.S. foreign policy. This staggering cost of human life does not even begin to account for the indirect death toll. The wars in the Middle East caused massive damage to infrastructure, destroying hospitals, sewers, homes, and power for millions. As injuries, sicknesses, and starvation thrived, indirect deaths grew exponentially. According to the Geneva Declaration Secretaria's “Global Burden of Armed Conflict," there are roughly four additional "indirect civilian deaths per direct death (Guha-Sapir 3),". The deaths associated with these causes are inappropriately described as "indirect deaths" and Remain unaccounted for by U.S. media or politicians. In Noam Chomsky's book "Because We Say So," Chomsky describes an experience in Gaza, "Throughout these years, Gaza has been kept on a level of bare survival, imprisoned by land.... On the eve of the latest attack, the U.N. reported that 40 percent of essential drugs and more than half of essential medical items were out of stock. In November, one of the first in a series of hideous photos sent from Gaza showed a doctor holding the charred corpse of a murdered child." Who is at fault when a hospital has to treat so many people that it cannot treat an injured child because it is out of medicine? What happens when a U.S. drone strike takes out a power grid and life support can no longer function to treat a civilian injured by a U.S. landmine? Who is at fault when accounting for the direct and indirect combined estimate of 2.5 million civilian deaths in the Middle East since 9/11? According to Unicef's report "Mena generation 2030," about "50% of the Middle Easts Population are young people and children.(Mena 2)" If we assume there is a direct correlation between civilian deaths and age statistics, a staggering death toll of 1.25 million children must be accounted for.

"The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation. Our fifth objective, a new world order, can emerge."

George Herbert Walker Bush, Address to the Union,Delivered 9/11/1990 21:15:16

The United States military is currently involved in 7 wars in the Middle East. The U.S. state and military leadership acting as the lapdog for corporate interests has engulfed all of the Middle East in the flames of war. If the invasions were not enough, there is the constant threat of more U.S.-backed coups, U.S.-backed dictatorships, or the genocide carried out by the extremist terror groups funded, trained, armed, and supported by the CIA and U.S. military. These heinous crimes are not some mistake of lousy intelligence; they result from intense propaganda from the American news media and systemic corruption of state members by corporate interests. It is no small coincidence that the Bush family are executives of several oil companies. President George Herbert Walker Bush and future heir to the throne George Bush had vested interests in Middle East oil. Chomsky's insight in "Because We Say So" states the choices of American leadership move in lockstep with corporate interests, "in lock—step service to the very rich and the corporate sector. Since votes cannot be obtained on that platform, the party has been compelled to mobilize sectors of the society that are extremist by world standards. The Republican establishment and its business sponsors had expected.... to privatize, deregulate, and limit government while retaining those parts that serve wealth and power, like the military. (Chomsky)" Private corporations in the United States have calculatingly built a fanatical base of violent extremists on both the left and right. The extremism was easily achieved using advanced propaganda and technology developed hand in hand with the U.S. government. The propaganda machine constantly reveals itself in news media, video games, movies, and, more recently, propaganda-focused A.I. in social media. By pay-offs for senate, house, and even presidential candidates, private interests have created a dictatorial control over the worlds resources and people. The U.S. military-industrial complex and its endless wars have built immeasurable power at home and abroad. As power is nothing without surfs, the U.S. extremist base acts at a local and international level to enforce authoritarian and capitalist ideologies.

"For some people, empire is quite profitable. Don't ever say that George Bush's policy in Iraq isn't working; it's working, it's just not working for you or for me or for the Iraqi's but it's working for certain interests..... Cue bono is the Latin phrase for who benefits, who gets the pay off on this?"

Michael Parenti-The Darker Myths of Empire

From the jury to the judge, the soldier to the general, the contractor to the CEO, exists a paradigm in which the world populous has been manipulated to serve the capitalist and imperialist doctrine of the United States. This doctrine purposefully creates a false narrative to justify an unending genocide at home and abroad. Genocide results from a long-term investment by U.S. private interests with no concern for the repercussions; it is no small mistake. The history of U.S. coups in the Middle East began with Iran's 1953 coup de'tat. The coup was meant to establish a dictatorship sympathetic to U.S. interests. This military and financial support of the Iranian dictatorial shah continued until around 1979, when Iran ousted the pro-American leadership. While the Iran war had been occurring since the 1960s, the U.S. and its corporate interests established control over Iraq and its oil reserves. In 1979 during the height of the cold war, the U.S. abandoned its position in Iran. Under President Ronald Reagan, with the help of CIA head and future president George Bush, work to provide training, arms, chemical weapons, and billions in funding for the long-term installment of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Iraqi dictatorship of Hussein would continue for roughly 20 years. The CIA under Reagan also trained and armed Saddam's death squad in Iraq; death squads were used to silence free speech and maintain dictatorial control of the country's resources. Meanwhile, the CIA is also training and arming Al-Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. For the next 20 years, Saddam Hussein used advanced chemical weapons and military training from the United States to carry out mass genocide. With the power of U.S. weapons, Saddam killed 1 million Iranians and an additional "200,000 Kurdish (Burns)" innocents in Iraq. Eventually, Saddam decided he would no longer act as a U.S. puppet and decided to keep the oil for his country. Immediately after, the United States invaded Iraq in operation Desert Storm. According to Dr. David Vine of the American Universities anthropology department in The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (University of California Press, 2020), "While other wealthy industrialized nations created welfare states after World War II with investments in universal health care, education, childcare, housing, and other social benefits, U.S. leaders and elites created a warfare state built around the construction and maintenance of military bases, the world's largest arms industry, a large standing military, and the wars that followed in their wake." (Vine 237). Tragically these endless wars have starved America of education, housing, and child welfare. Again, these costs are minor compared to the price the rest of the world pays for western imperialism and the excess of western whites. When justice is in such short supply for our nation, how can we hope to bring justice to the world?

“I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence.

You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.”

― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi an autobiography.

Every last death and refugee from these wars is the result of a system without ethics, existing only to quench its endless thirst for power. These deaths are not accidental. In fact, they are the direct result of planning and implementation by government officials and private corporations. Brown Universities' "Costs of War Project" states that when considering post-9/11 U.S. wars, "Wartime displacement (alongside war deaths and injuries) must be central to any analysis of the post-9/11 wars and their consequences. Displacement also must be central to any consideration of the future use of military force by the United States or others. Ultimately, the figure of 38 million and perhaps as many as 60 million raises the question of who bears responsibility for repairing the damage inflicted on those displaced. (Vine 2)'Who should be held accountable? Are the Bush family the only ones who should bear responsibility, or perhaps it is Hussein and the Taliban that are to blame for the 60million refugees since 9/11 in the Middle East? Whom would we hold accountable for the mass genocide and trauma that occurred due to U.S. war and intervention? How would the world's people even go about confronting those responsible for generations of trauma? How could I expect accountability for my son from the same kangaroo court that supports the War Crimes of the Bushs? Do we blame human nature for these crimes? Even the question of how many innocent civilians have been killed in U.S. wars is tragically so immense that it is impossible to answer. How could the U.S Military-Industrial-Complex ever hope to justify taking the life of a single child when each life is of immeasurable value.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child.' Emma Goldman

Works Cited

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Kaufman, Ellie. "Over 40% of Afghan Refugees at U.S. Bases Are Children, Pentagon Says." CNN, Cable News Network, 20 Oct. 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/politics/afghan-children-at-us-bases/index.html.

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