{"id":272520,"date":"2024-09-02T12:01:20","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T11:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=272520"},"modified":"2024-08-29T05:46:07","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T04:46:07","slug":"blinken-marks-anniversary-of-rohingya-genocide-even-as-us-finances-genocide-of-palestinians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/blinken-marks-anniversary-of-rohingya-genocide-even-as-us-finances-genocide-of-palestinians\/","title":{"rendered":"Blinken Marks Anniversary of Rohingya Genocide Even as US Finances Genocide of Palestinians"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
Photo: Prachatai\/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

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The US secretary of state’s genocide memorial tweet is a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of supreme hypocrisy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

27 Aug 2024 <\/em>– On 24 Aug, in the midst of the US-financed genocide in Gaza by Israel, and on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Myanmar\u2019s genocide of Rohingya people, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted:<\/p>\n

\u201cToday marks the seventh anniversary of the Burma military\u2019s genocide and crimes against humanity targeting Rohingya. The United States continues to honour the victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His tweet received 1 million views on X though it is impossible to see how many viewers take the American diplomat seriously. But, most certainly, students of \u201chypocrisy\u201d will find Blinken\u2019s genocide memorial tweet a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of \u201csupreme hypocrisy\u201d, to borrow Noam Chomsky\u2019s characterisation of a quintessentially American feature of Pax Americana.<\/p>\n

In fact, such acts of supreme hypocrisy are an exclusive and special characteristic of all colonisers that hailed from the old Europe (and its white settler colonial offshoots). More so in the case of the United States, whose Declaration of Independence thundered as a self-evident truth that \u201call men are created equal\u201d while in the same breath, the same venerable statement openly dehumanise as \u201cSavages\u201d\u00a0 the native peoples from whom America\u2019s \u201cfounding fathers\u201d stole vast swathes of lands to build a permanent settler colonial state.<\/p>\n

On August 25, the Rohingyas commemorated the seventh anniversary of their own \u201cNever again!\u201d.\u00a0 Nearly eight decades after the total defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, and the end of the Nazis\u2019 genocidal colonial project, everyone in their right mind is painfully cognisant of the moral emptiness of this post-Holocaust promise.<\/p>\n

There have been dozens of recurring cases of genocide during the 79 years since the closure of the Nazi\u2019s main site of the \u2018Final Solution to the Jewish Question\u2019. Recurring, because the leading nations of the world with veto or dictatorial power at the United Nations have either been incapable of preventing crimes against humanity, including the crime of genocide, or, worse still, have been directly and indirectly involved in these organised horror shows worldwide.<\/p>\n

As a matter of historical record, Blinken\u2019s own United States has played an instrumental role in several genocides and other crimes against humanity in my own Asian neighbourhoods, as well as throughout Latin America.\u00a0 Enter Indonesia under Suharto, the American War in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Ecuador, to name just some of the well-documented cases of US-enabled, financed or patronised atrocity crimes.<\/p>\n

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Vietnam War, 1972. Photo: Raymond Depardon\/manhhai\/flickr CC BY 2.0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When I was a young academic in a teacher education university in Chicago some 25 years ago, I became friends with an African-American gentleman, a generation older than me, who was in charge of the university\u2019s postal services. With a detectable air of pained bitterness, he recounted his experience as a US veteran of the Vietnam War. In his words, which came to be etched in my memory after so many years,\u00a0 \u201cYou know we (black men) were sent to Vietnam (by the US government) and told that we were there to defend democracy and freedom. Then we came home, and we were told, \u2018you can\u2019t eat sandwich at this counter or drink coffee at that table.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wryly laughed at what he painfully experienced as stomach-turning American hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Likewise, a decade ago in Phnom Penh, I heard live from the public gallery an angry complaint about official American hypocrisy from a radically different type of character.<\/p>\n

Sitting inside the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, with its bullet-proof glass wall, in his closing statement, the Pol Pot regime\u2019s Brother Number Two, Noun Chea asked, in effect, why American policymakers (for instance, Henry Kissinger who was considered a key architect of the carpet bombing of Indochina, specifically Northern Cambodia along the Vietnamese-Khmer borders) were not in the defendant\u2019s dock, along with him.<\/p>\n

By throwing millions of US taxpayer money into establishing a genocide documentation post facto, a UN-Cambodia hybrid criminal court, and running it for over 10 years, the United States had by then washed its official blood-stained hands in Cambodia\u2019s bloody civil war of which the emergence of the genocidal Pol Pot regime was a devastating outcome.<\/p>\n

To belabour the obvious, Blinken is not responsible for what the early crop of European genocidal settlers \u2013 euphemistically framed as \u201cfounding fathers\u201d \u2013\u00a0 did to the Indigenous populations of the United States, nor the carpet-bombing of Indochina (Laos, Northern Cambodia and Vietnam) during the undeclared war fought in the name of \u201cthe defence of freedom\u201d.\u00a0 That last American \u201cbig war\u201d in Asia claimed the lives of millions of humans on both sides of the conflict: nearly 3 million Vietnamese and 86,000 American troops, and left many more millions, deeply wounded, psychologically and physically.<\/p>\n

But, in his capacity as US Secretary of State, running the \u201cIsrael, right or wrong\u201d policy, Blinken certainly is amongst a sizeable pool of genocide enablers, including US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British PM Sir Keir Starmer, EU External Affairs Chief Ursula von der Leyen who have been aiding and abetting Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, under Tel Aviv\u2019s openly announced \u201ctotal siege\u201d.<\/p>\n

Against US President Joe Biden\u2019s apparent mental incapacity to lead or manage US foreign policy, specifically, the US policy towards Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza and the blatantly illegal and expansionist land grab in the Occupied Territories in West Bank, Blinken is not merely executing orders to supply the state of Israel with additional two dozen billion dollars worth of weapons\u00a0 such as 1,000 to 2,000-ton bombs, advanced killing machines such as fighter-bombers, drones, etc., but rather as a self-proclaimed Zionist, Blinken is personally and officially involved in Israel\u2019s \u201cphysical destruction\u201d of the Palestinian people, in the name of the settler coloniser-occupier\u2019s \u201cself-defence\u201d.<\/p>\n

Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians in Gaza (and all the Occupied Territories) have been declared by the UN\u2019s highest court and principal judicial organ \u2013 the International Court of Justice \u2013\u00a0 \u201ca protected group\u201d under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.<\/p>\n

So, for Blinken as the official who is calling the shots on US policy towards Israel, to publicly declare that \u201cthe United States continues to honour the [Rohingya] victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities\u201d, is, in my view, more than an act of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Ordinary citizens and individuals often act in ways that qualify as hypocritical. But men like Blinken with an extraordinary amount of institutional power \u2013 to ship, or not to ship, billions of dollars worth of weapons to a state, which by all indications, is engaged in the \u201cphysical destruction\u201d of a human population under occupation \u2013 cannot be considered simply\u00a0 \u201chypocritical\u201d. The words hypocrisy and hypocritical just won\u2019t do.<\/p>\n

As a matter of fact, our network of Asian scholar activists \u2013 the Forces of Renewal SouthEast Asia \u2013 has recently published former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad\u2019s 10-point statement, which he titled \u201chypocrisy\u201d.\u00a0 In it, the world\u2019s oldest statesman listed key US crimes and pointed out Washington\u2019s complicity in global crimes, past and present while focusing on the present American financing and direct involvement in Israel\u2019s genocide.<\/p>\n

Mahathir is not alone in seeing through the American fog of liberal propaganda framed in the discourses of \u201crule of law\u201d, \u201caccountability\u201d, \u201crule-based world order\u201d, and other grandiose statements. From his deathbed, the late Harold Pinter, the renowned British playwright, devoted half of his acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize for Literature, urging the world to begin taking stock of the worldwide crimes of the United States.<\/p>\n

Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers and activists alive today \u2013 albeit sadly in a state of paralysis \u2013 has publicly characterised his own native country as \u201cNumber One Rogue State\u201d. The tweet Blinken sent out on the eve of the Rohingya genocide anniversary is beyond hypocrisy. It reflects the quintessentially American disease, which the psychologically inclined among us might call schizophrenia.<\/p>\n

The legally informed, on the other hand, would see Blinken\u2019s tweet as Kafkaesquely criminal.\u00a0 For one can\u2019t be involved in one case of genocide (Israel) while at the same time demanding accountability and justice for victims in another (Myanmar).<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center \u2013 Cambodia.\u00a0Zarni is the co-founder of <\/em>FORSEA<\/a>, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for <\/em>Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the <\/em>European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. <\/strong>Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the <\/em>New York Times, The Guardian and<\/em> the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are <\/em>The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), <\/em>An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and <\/em>Myanmar\u2019s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, <\/em>Essays on Myanmar Genocide.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thewire.in<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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