{"id":248825,"date":"2023-11-27T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2023-11-27T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=248825"},"modified":"2023-11-21T05:14:26","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T05:14:26","slug":"on-the-perpetration-of-mass-death-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/11\/on-the-perpetration-of-mass-death-events\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Perpetration of Mass-Death Events"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 Nov 2023 <\/em>– The holocaust now visited on Palestine by US\/Israel is unique in many ways. Rates of killing and maiming exceed those of previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the perpetrators announce their genocidal intent with unusual frankness, and Western media and official apologists are especially shameless.<\/p>\n

But in a world under centuries of West European domination, this particular intentional genocide\/mass-death event ought to seem familiar. These mass killings have always been necessary for the global system to function, providing land for settlement, cultivation and resource extraction, labor for hyper-exploitation, and geopolitical power.<\/p>\n

In the \u201clong 16th century\u201d (~1450 to ~1650) the capitalist world system emerged, marked by the guiding imperative of endless accumulation of wealth. [1] This system rests on colonialism, neo-colonialism, settler-colonialism (subjugation, expulsion, and extermination of indigenous populations), chattel slavery, hyper-exploitation of labor, and now neoliberal globalization. It insures that wealth flows steadily from Global South to Global North.<\/p>\n

This system of plunder established chiefly by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and Americans, would come to serve what is now loosely called the Global North, or \u201cthe triad,\u201d of North America, Western Europe, and (last-added) Japan. Complex financial and production systems (\u201ccommodity chains\u201d) now link labor and resources of the Global South to the triad and its smaller appendages (Australia, New Zealand, Israel). The system requires constant nurturing and prolific violence to suppress the costs of labor, resources, and non-monopoly-protected manufactures from the Global South. It is also imperative that the triad keep the vast majority of the world\u2019s population from becoming affluent enough to compete for essential commodities. [2]<\/p>\n

Today the US is the prime enforcer of this system, with at least 800 military bases encircling the globe, under miltary commands covering every inch of the Earth. [3]\u00a0 This global occupation is a gun, figuratively and literally, held to the head of every government and person on the planet. The overweening power of this occupation expresses itself through most of the world\u2019s governments, including in the long-standing practice of exterminating and expelling Palestinians pursuant to Israel\u2019s settler-colonial effort.<\/p>\n

David Michael Smith\u2019s Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire<\/em> is an elegantly concise account of US responsibility, sole and shared, for mass deaths. [4]\u00a0 He counts roughly 300 million deaths. This includes North American slavery and the Indigenous genocide, naturally. But it also includes US complicity in the two world wars, through its profiteering and support for fascist regimes, East and West, in the period before World War II, and its calculated delay in entering that war, after much of the killing and destruction wrought by the Axis powers had been accomplished, aided by the US. [5]\u00a0 As many others have noted, both 20th century world wars and the ravages of fascism could have been avoided.<\/p>\n

After World War II, the US helped bring mass death to countries too numerous to list here. For example, Greece (about 165,000), Korea (about 5 million), Cambodia\/Laos\/Vietnam (about 8 million), Indonesia (over 1 million), El Salvador\/Guatemala\/Honduras\/Nicaragua (100s of thousands), Iraq (1 to 2 million), Iran (over half a million) Afghanistan (100s of thousands), Libya (100s of thousands), Syria (100s of thousands), Palestine (10s of thousands), Rwanda (1 to 2 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) (over 6 million), Somalia (100s of thousands), Yemen (100s of thousands), Ukraine (about 14,000 before February 24, 2022 and 100s of thousands since).<\/p>\n

In the periods of 1945-1980, and 1980-2020, Smith counts 29 and 25 million deaths respectively [6], noting, \u201cBy 1980, the holocausts of Pax Americana resembled the global horrors that a reasonable observer might have expected from a fascist victory in the Second World War.\u201d [7]<\/p>\n

But the US is also successor to the half-millenium project of the rich nations to own the world.\u00a0 Indeed, the US empire is the culmination of that ambition. [8]\u00a0 Accordingly, the US bears responsibility not just for its own mass-death events and those of proxies and collaborators, but also of previous empires to which the US is now the beneficiary. Thus to the deaths Smith attributes to the US, we should add pre-World War II mass death perpetrated on other continents by the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, German, and Italian empires, whose plunder of the Global South is legendary. An accounting would surely more than double Smith\u2019s tally of 300 million killed in US-authored mass-death events.<\/p>\n

Still, the very worst thing about these mass deaths is what they are for. They not only maintain Western imperial military and political prerogatives, but they enforce and entrench a global system in which the vast majority of humanity is confined to poorer countries with governments powerless to resist hyper-exploitation of their labor by the multinational corporations of the triad. The greater part of the value produced by their labor is then captured (not \u201cearned\u201d) by these corporations based in the triad. [9]\u00a0 As Intan Suwandi notes in her Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism<\/em>, \u201cSo extreme is this overaccumulation that the twenty-six wealthiest individuals in the world, most of whom are Americans, now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world\u2019s population, 3.8 billion people.\u201d [10]\u00a0 This is not merely unjust, it condemns a great part of the world\u2019s eight billion people to lives of poverty, insecurity, hunger, disease, and violence.<\/p>\n

It is hard to imagine an end to this macabre world regime, unless in nuclear omnicide. World-wide demonstrations, UN resolutions, labor action against weapons shipments, and wars have not stopped the century-long laceration of Palestine, let alone brought down the capitalist world system that produced it. But perhaps the movements, governments, and armed forces now rising in the South and East can, finally, transform the system which has tormented humanity for centuries.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century <\/em>(New York\/London: Academic Press, 1974); The Essential Wallerstein <\/em>(New York: The New Press, 2000); World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction <\/em>(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004).<\/p>\n

[2] Patnaik, Prabhat. \u201cImperialism in the Era of Globalization.\u201d<\/a> Monthly Review, July-August 2015, Volume 67, Number 3.<\/p>\n

[3] \u201cThe World With Commanders\u2019 Areas of Responsibility,\u201d<\/a> Library of Congress. Vine, David \u201cU.S. Military Bases Abroad, 2020.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

[4] Smith, David Michael. Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire<\/em>. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023, p. 15.<\/p>\n

[5] Smith, Endless Holocausts<\/em>, pp. 153-167.<\/p>\n

[6] Smith, Endless Holocausts<\/em>, pp. 209, 256.<\/p>\n

[7] Smith, Endless Holocausts<\/em>, pp. 170.<\/p>\n

[8] Perhaps it began formally with the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Saragossa (1529), in which Spain and Portugal divided the world between them, like an apple.<\/p>\n

[9] Suwandi, Intan. Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism.<\/em> New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.<\/p>\n

[10] Suwandi, Value Chains<\/em>, p. 65.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Roger Stoll lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has published articles, book\u00a0reviews and political poetry in <\/em>Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice,\u00a0Internationalist 360, Jewschool, Marxism-Leninism Today, MintPress News,\u00a0MRonline, New Verse News, Orinoco Tribune, Popular Resistance, Resumen\u00a0Latinoamericano, San Francisco Examiner, and<\/em> ZNet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Nov 2023 – The holocaust now visited on Palestine by US\/Israel is unique in many ways. Rates of killing and maiming exceed those of previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the perpetrators announce their genocidal intent with unusual frankness, and Western media and official apologists are especially shameless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":248196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1199,87,865,88,427,70,1025,886],"class_list":["post-248825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-usa","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248827,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248825\/revisions\/248827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}