I’d like to note two articles by Professor Michel Chossudovsky published this November in Global Research: they help explain the current denigration of the Convention on Genocide. When we grow accustomed to our system’s atrocities we lessen our humanity.
In an article of November 13th, 20191 Chossudovsky outlines the history of George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, supplying the Axis with oil through Standard Oil Company during WWII. This was allowed by the U.S. government. It is “news” in 2019 because this mechanism of cooperating with the enemy was hidden from the U.S. people. About 25 years ago Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin2 wrote of Prescott Bush’s service to and partnership with the Harrimans’ Union Banking Corporation which in turn served Fritz Thyssen, a financer of Adolph Hitler. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act this Bush-Harriman Nazi front was impounded by the U.S. government in 1942. What is remarkable about Prof. Chossudovsky’s article isn’t so much the financial involvement of the Bush family with Nazi interests, but the logic of motivation and why the U.S. would allow oil resources under its control to be shipped to the enemy during a war. Answer: it was hoped Nazi Germany would stop the Soviet state; ie., ‘to stop Communism.’ Over twenty million Russians died. Prescott Bush went on to become a wealthy Republican Senator from Connecticut. With the Third Reich’s defeat the war against communism became the Cold War.
This should interest genocide scholars because it reveals a genocidal intent in U.S. policy. Article II of the U.N. Convention on Genocide includes in its definition of genocide, … acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such…. The Soviet Union was a national group. It committed no aggression against the United States.
In the article of November 13th and a subsequent article of November 22nd3 Prof. Chossudovsky relies on declassified material which reveals that the U.S. was prepared to bomb the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons wiping out 66 major cities, both during the war itself and following Truman’s bombing of Hiroshima. The U.S.S.R. didn’t have nuclear weapons until 1948 so the plans were predicated on a nuclear first strike. The absolute destruction of a national group whose people had chosen to live under Communism (nuclear production gradually grew to include cities of other Communist national groups) would have constituted genocide. The military policy under consideration was in direct opposition to human decency, the Geneva Conventions, the U.S.-British-U.S.S.R. military alliance of WWII, the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-6, and the Convention on Genocide signed by the U.S. in 1948 which became effective in 1951. While the early plans to bomb 66 Soviet cities weren’t put into action the manufacture of nuclear weapons increased to fulfill the goal of enough bombs to obliterate all of the Soviet Union’s cities.
It may be for this reason that genocide prevention organizations of the U.S. and Canada, if not throughout NATO, were and are strongly controlled if not regulated, and are often directly funded by the government. Despite the Convention, the basis of U.S. and NATO policy was genocide and the total eradication of the Soviet Union by nuclear weapons would be a crime with no statute of limitations. The military edge of anti-Communism came to mean the possible obliteration of entire peoples. A military mindset allowing national obliteration helps explain U.S. lack of restraint in conventional bombing of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure during the First Gulf War.
By 2019 the plans to obliterate Russia, no longer a Communist state, have possibly been transferred or expanded to include the People’s Republic of China. In either case extermination of a national group, an entire country, an entire people, is a violation of the Genocide Convention and would require presentation of the bombing as an act of self defense, while the ethic of the Convention would have to be ignored or bent by the West’s media so that rulers permitting a genocide could continue to rule. I think it’s for this reason that the Convention on Genocide was out of print at the United Nations in 1989 when our kitchen table press published it.4 Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi officer under Germany’s Third Reich was Secretary General at the U.N.; the U.S. had with relative silence ratified the Convention on Genocide after a forty year hiatus in 1988, yet the Convention was out of print at the U.N. and not easily available to the public. Was there something the people weren’t supposed to know? The U.S. had added at its ratification of the Convention treaty, qualifications, caveats which would allow it not be bound by the Convention while giving the appearance of commitment. Also, the United States and NATO forces Coalition were about to bomb Iraq “into the stone age,” invade and take over its resources. I included in the edition5 the U.S. “Reservations and Declarations” added at the U.S. 1988 ratification of the Convention. We sent free copies (publication expenses came out of our food budget) to the U.S. Congress. In my “Foreword” to the Canadian edition in 1996, I could point out that the U.S. qualifications of its commitment to genocide prevention were telegraphing an intention to apply the tactic of genocide in instances it considered necessary, directly contravening the Convention. The U.S. alone of all nations, claims the right to judge for itself whether or not it has committed an act of genocide. This awareness isn’t shared by North America’s corporate, academic, highly funded and government-allied organizations intended to prevent genocides.
Accountability for the crime of genocide remains within the domain of the powerful. Apparently the powerful are concerned that if the ongoing mechanisms of genocide are overturned in one region they may be overturned in another and the entire fabric of profit and controls will unravel. Signatory major powers have not brought Israel before International Court on charges of Israel’s alleged genocide of Palestinians. The U.S. and Coalition destruction of Iraq was not permitted testing as the crime of genocide at any court with the power to apply the law, domestically or internationally.6. The tragedy of genocide against Myanmar’s Rohingya should have been addressed in 2012. The genocide trials of Guatemala should have been supported by the nations who signed the Genocide Convention. There are examples in every country subservient to foreign powers of a blindness to what the takeover of a peoples and their cultures mean. Current policies against native peoples by Canada, the U.S. or fascist governments in the Americas, remain unaddressed. The effect of this is that genocide becomes a non-issue. This encourages impunity. France, Italy, Hungary, in particular, openly commenced an ethnic cleansing of Roma people domestically, and throughout the European Union the Roma continue to be persecuted as if they are not intended to survive as a racial or ethnic group.
Accustomed to the crime of genocide the first world bathes in comparative luxury while its rulers inch closer and closer to the first strikes or threat of first strike, to rid the world of opposing ideologies and the people who support them. Poor people will either be drawn to ideologies which oppose their oppressors, or enslaved. Publishers and news media do not represent markets for liberation. It becomes difficult to write about the crime of genocide, or note warnings except those warnings comfortable with government policy. From inception the crimes are perception-managed so that the victims may be aware but the general populations of the aggressor countries are not. These crimes and their lack of prosecution enforce a mind control that moves the crime of genocide toward being awful but… acceptable. It is not acceptable. We are living amid monstrous crimes which we know are crimes, yet our governments and media are accepting these as normal. This “normal” will not let humanity survive.
• First published in Nightslantern
- “Sleeping With The Third Reich: America’s Unspoken “Alliance” with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union,” Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, November 13, 2019, Global Research.
- Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography, Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.
- “Wipe the Soviet Union Off the Map”, 204 Atomic Bombs against 66 Major Cities, US Nuclear Attack against USSR Planned During World War II,” Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, November 22, 2019, Global Research.
- The Crime of Genocide & Bill of Human Rights, U.N. Texts, Moody Maine: J.B.Gerald & J. Maas, 1989.
- “Foreword,” Common Rights & Expectations: United Nations Texts of Primary Treaties Concerning Rights of People, ed. J.B.Gerald, Ottawa: Gerald & Maas, 1996.
- The legal case presented for consideration by the Spanish National Court: “Narration of Facts by the Ad Hoc Committee for Justice for Iraq,” Ad Hoc Committee for Justice for Iraq, October 6, 2009, http://usgenocide.org/the-legal-case/; and At Night’s Lantern