from Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast
"The
present world order supplies stability and rationality of a sort for human
society, while its day-to-day operations chew up the weak, the scapegoats, and
almost anyone else in its way. This is not necessarily an evil conspiracy of
insiders; it is a structural dilemma that generates itself more or less
consistently from place to place and from generation to generation.
Much
of modern society has been built upon genocide. This crime was integral to the
emergence of the United States, of czarist Russia and later the USSR, of
European empires, and of many other states. Today, modern governments continue
extermination of indigenous peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America,
mainly as a means of stealing land and natural resources. Equally pernicious,
though often less obvious, the present world order has institutionalized
persecution and deprivation of hundreds of millions of children, particularly
in the Third World, and in this way kills countless innocents each year. These
systemic atrocities are for the most part not even regarded as crimes, but
instead are writ- | ten off by most of the world's media and intellectual
leadership as acts of God or of nature whose origin remains a mystery.
It
is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create
genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social
systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for
"authorized" acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present
systemic brutality as a necessary evil. Some observers may claim that men such
as Allen Dulles, Robert Murphy, et al. were gripped by an ideal of a higher
good when they preserved the power of the German business elite as a hedge
against revolution in Europe. But in the long run, their intentions have little
to do with the real issue, which is the character of social systems that permit
decisions institutionalizing murder to take on the appearance of wisdom,
reason, or even justice among the men and women who lead society.
Progress
in the control of genocide depends in part on confronting those who would
legitimize and legalize the act. The cycle of genocide can be broken through
relatively simple-but politically difficult-reforms in the international legal
system. It is essential to identify and condemn the deeds that contribute to
genocide, particularly when such deeds have assumed a mantle of respectability,
and to ensure just and evenhanded punishment for those responsible. But the
temptation will be to accept the inducements and rationalizations society
offers in exchange for keeping one's mouth shut. The choice is in our
hands."