Politically Correct Holocausts

from the book

Triumph of the Market

by Edward S. Herman

published by South End Press, 1995

The concept of "political correctness," as used by the mainstream media and pundits, has wide applicability. It comprises ideas and claims that challenge established ("really correct" [RC]) thought and behavior, and are pressed upon mainstream individuals and institutions by minorities and other outsiders. There is politically correct (PC) language and deportment, but also politically correct history and even politically correct conspiracies. For example, that the assassination of JFK was carried out by more than one person (Oswald) is PC, and thus has been subjected to indignant repudiation by the dominant media. By contrast, that the shooting of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981 was a plot hatched by the KGB and Bulgarians was an RC conspiracy that Newsweek, NBC-TV, and the New York Times accepted enthusiastically and uncritically, despite the absence of any credible evidence.

PC and RC Holocausts

There is also a sharp distinction between holocausts that the establishment recognizes and finds deserving of attention and indignation, and those that mainstreamers ignore but which are deemed worthy of attention by marginalized people and "extremists." The former, which are RC, may be illustrated by the case of Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot, or the "Final Solution" under Hitler (although only in retrospect, not at the time of the killing, as described below). Those that are of little interest to the establishment, and which can be classed as PC, may be illustrated by the slaughter of over a million Armenians by the Turks in 1915, and the decimation of the East Timorese population by the Indonesian army from 1975 onward.

There is obviously a close correlation between the "worthiness" of the victims as perceived by the Western establishment and the recognition of the holocaust. As the West was built in good part on the destruction and exploitation of colonial peoples and on a slave system, the associated victims are hardly likely to be "worthy" or their holocausts RC for dominant Westerners. Such holocausts are an embarrassment as well as painfully at odds with myth structures of the West.

It also seems likely that the differentiation between PC and RC holocausts will fit the schema of dividing bloodbaths into those that are Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious. In this classification system, Constructive bloodbaths are those associated with political changes seen as advantageous to Western political interests. They may be carried out by ourselves (Vietnam), or by an ally or factions within a foreign state (Indonesia in 1965-69). Benign bloodbaths are those carried out by Western client states that, while not necessarily helpful, are treated with indulgence and understanding (East Timor, invaded and occupied by Indonesia; South Africa beating up everybody in its neighborhood in the 1980s). Nefarious bloodbaths are those carried out by enemy states. The hypothesis is that there will be great indignation and channeled benevolence in the last case, whereas for Constructive or Benign bloodbaths there will be a combination of rationalization and eye aversion. Only the holocausts associated with Nefarious bloodbaths will be RC-the others will be PC.

PC as Myth Deconstruction: The Case of Columbus

One function of PC (and multiculturalism) is clearly myth deconstruction. This is dramatically evident in the new revisionist evaluation of Christopher Columbus. The conventional-traditional view has been that Columbus was a visionary, a brave pioneer who "discovered America" and thus opened up the "New World" to the West, yielding a beneficent influx of precious metals to Europe, emigration to freedom, and progress. In the traditional view the discovery was an uncontaminated triumph. Hans Koning writes in Columbus: His Enterprise, that "It may exist somewhere, but I have not found one grade school or high school book that does not treat Columbus as the great hero he was not."

The revisionist and PC view looks at Columbus' enterprise from the standpoint of the victimized non-White populations "being discovered," the greed, ruthlessness and genocidal racism and policies of the erstwhile "heroes," the cooperative role in this enterprise of the Christian churches, and the mass death and degradation that followed. Columbus, who initially described the Arawak Indians of Hispaniola as gentle and friendly, soon wrote to Spain that "From here, in the name of the Blessed Trinity, we can send all the slaves that can be sold...for these people are totally unskilled in arms." He introduced gold quotas for the Indians, and maltreatment and disease reduced the Indian population of the island from 125-500,000 in 1492 to 10,000 in 1515.

The further advance of the Spanish into the "New World" took a similar toll elsewhere. The population of Mexico went from perhaps 25 million in 1519 to 6.3 million in 1548; in Peru the population declined from 7 million in 1519 to 1.8 million in 1580. A large fraction died from disease, but many were killed or died from overwork combined with widespread demoralization that led to alcoholism and suicides.

The North American Indians: A PC Holocaust

The North American Indian population fell from some 12-18 million before "discovery" to 300-400,000 in 1900, a better than 95 percent decline. Official and scholarly estimates up to recent decades maintained that pre-contact Indian numbers were between 500,000 and 1.5 million, in accord with the vision of North America as "unoccupied" and underutilized, until the takeover by the progressive Christian civilization of Europe. A large fraction of North American Indian casualties was from newly imported diseases, but a great many were killed in numerous massacres by the ruthless, merciless, profoundly racist, but technologically advanced, Christian barbarians. (In a characteristic Orwellian inversion by the powerful, the victimized natives were the cruel and "merciless savages," as expressed even in the Declaration of Independence.) If not killed outright the Indians were removed from their lands, and the basis for their livelihood and way of life deliberately destroyed. (General Phil Sheridan exterminated an estimated 60 million buffalo in the 1870s "in order to deny a basis for subsistence to the Cheyenne, Lakota, and other peoples of the Great Plains." There were l9th-century acknowledgements of a policy of complete extermination," and the Republic of Texas offered a cash bounty for Indian scalps. U.S. policy and practice merits well Ward Churchill's comparison with the operations of the German SS.

But this was us in action, the blood-bath was constructive, so that this is not an RC holocaust and is treated with brevity and evasiveness in mainstream textbooks, allowing the occupation of the continent by us to be a triumph of good people building a new North American order.

PC and the Slave Trade

PC holocausts usually involve the slaughter of people of color, who have regularly been the victims of Western exploitation and violence. Their role makes them victims of constructive or benign bloodbaths, hence unworthy, and hence not RC. The PC-RC dichotomization parallels contemporary usage in the application of the word terrorism. For example, the apartheid government of South Africa was never a "terrorist state" (or naked aggressor) in Western government expert-media representations in the 1980s although it was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps more than a million, Black Africans in that decade.

Earlier, the slave trade produced one of the greatest holocausts in human history, but as the West did the victimizing this is only a PC, not an RC, holocaust. With the virtual extermination of the native populations of the New World, and the discovery of the enormous profitability of slave labor in raising sugar, "the market"-in combination with state organized and protected terrorism that seized, transported, and sold slaves-gave new life to human slavery and the slave trade from the 15th century onward. Later, it was found that tobacco and cotton could also be profitably cultivated using slave labor, and the reach of slavery was extended, persisting until the latter part of the 19th century.

Roger Anstey and J. E. Inikori estimate that some 12 million enslaved Africans were successfully shipped to the New World between 1451 and 1870. But the conditions of the trade were so horrendous that the 12 million were the residual of 48 million originally seized, with 36 million dying en route. As L. S. Stavrianos describes it in Global Rift:

The 36 million casualties were sustained in the course of the overland march from the interior to the coast, and then during the dreaded overseas "middle passage" to the New World. Inhuman crowding, stifling heat and poor food resulted in appalling mortality rates during the ocean crossing. Maize and water once every twenty-four hours was the standard diet. If the slaves refused to eat they were lashed and if that failed, hot irons were used to force them to eat. When epidemics broke out, as they often did under the foul conditions, the sick slaves were drowned in order to prevent infection from spreading. Sometimes the slaves jumped overboard rather than endure the misery. Indeed, this became so common that nets were fixed all around the decks in order to prevent suicides.

This holocaust served dominant Western interests and was institutionalized and participated in by all the great powers of the West. Their commercial elites built fortunes and respectability on the basis of this business, either directly in trading slaves or indirectly in supplying provisions for the slavers or exporting the sugar and molasses, and later the tobacco and cotton. Accounts of the history of the great powers stress the economic importance of the sugar-cotton-tobacco economy to the West, but the human cost is mentioned only in passing if at all. For example, Richard Cobban, a liberal historian of France, notes the great importance of the Caribbean in French trade and prosperity in the 18th century, and he castigates Louis XVI's foreign policy for failing to give sufficient protection to French interests in the Caribbean, which he says "were worth fighting for. The condition of the slaves and the morality of slavery and the slave trade, so crucial to Caribbean economics, are addressed in a single parenthetical statement "(its morality [the slave trade] as yet is barely subject of discus

In brief, slavery and the slave trade are normalized, given their importance in Western economy and institutions. And being normalized they can hardly constitute an RC holocaust.

"The Final Solution": From PC to RC

Western attitudes toward specific holocausts may change over time. This can be illustrated by the evolution of Western responses to Hitler's policy of exterminating the European Jews in the 1940s. At the time this policy began, the position of the Jews in the West was tenuous and their leaders were fearful and cautious. Anti-semitism was deeply embedded in Western cultures. As a result, the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi death camps was not given great attention or credence by the mainstream media. As Deborah Lipstadt has shown, it was mainly in the dissident media like The Nation and PM (a long defunct liberal-left New York newspaper) that the issue was treated as of first-order importance. In the New York Times and most of the mainstream media reports of the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews were put on the back pages, often next to the comics (see the final chapter of Lipstadt's book, Beyond Belief).

It was only after the war that attention to and indignation at the Final Solution became intense. No doubt this was partly because of fresh disclosures, but the lag in disclosure and the treatment of the substantial and horrifying evidence known earlier remain to be explained. The later attention and indignation were associated with the growth in affluence, confidence and power of Jewish communities in the United States and other great Western powers, and the increasing importance of Israel as a U.S. surrogate in the Middle East. In short, Jews became worthy victims in retrospect, and the Final Solution became an RC holocaust after the fact.

The murder by the Nazis of hundreds of thousands of gypsies, who continue to be a marginalized people, remains only a PC holocaust. In Congress Weekly, a publication of the American Jewish Congress, the well-known Zionist academic Edward Alexander referred to the charges of a Nazi genocide against homosexuals and gypsies as an "exploded fiction. " At a meeting in Jerusalem of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Professor Henry Guttenberg referred to the "real or supposed genocide of Armenians, homosexuals, Gypsies and American Indians." These denials of other and competing holocausts by spokespersons for those that are RC constitute a form a apologetics for the Nazis and other perpetrators of mass murders that are designated "fictions." But as these are PC holocausts, books on "holocaust denial" never include these deniers; they are not worthy of attention.

Vietnam War A PC Holocaust

The U.S. attack on Vietnam was one of the great holocausts of our time, but as it was perpetrated by us it is not only not an RC holocaust we are portrayed as victims of an unappreciative Vietnamese people In the "beyond chutzpah" category, the moral issue of the war turns on the Vietnamese treatment of our Missing in Action (MIAs) and Prisoners of War (POWs)!

The arrogant bullies who ran the United States after World War II refused the Vietnamese people the right of self-determination for 30 years because this was incompatible with Western control. We and the British supported French recolonization from 1945-54; we then refused to abide by the Geneva Accords of 1954 and allow unification of Vietnam by free elections. It was well known then and later that the great majority of Vietnamese, in the southern as well as northern parts of the country, supported Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists. The United States therefore simply ignored the Geneva Accords, the rights of the Vietnamese to self-rule, and the UN Charter, and imposed its own imported dictator on South Vietnam.

When this didn't work, in 1962 the Kennedy administration began pouring in helicopters and thousands of "advisers," and managed a vicious counterinsurgency war, which included using chemical warfare to destroy peasant crops as well as concentration camps for peasants (called "strategic hamlets"). When this also didn't work, Lyndon Johnson fabricated a "Bay of Tonkin" attack by the North Vietnamese, and began the systematic bombing of the North and a massive invasion of South Vietnam in 1965. All through the early 1960s, U.S. officials fought strenuously against any political settlement that would terminate complete domination of the South by a U.S.-controlled faction, despite the general acknowledgement that this faction had no substantial political support within the South.

What followed was one of the most vicious and cowardly wars in history. The greatest military power on earth, with the most advanced technological arsenal, deployed its full power against a poor peasant society without aircraft or a modern technological base. It virtually leveled Indochina with millions of tons of bombs, rained napalm and fragmentation bombs on many hundreds of peasant villages in the South that were without medical facilities, and used dioxin-based Agent Orange in a massive program of destruction of forests and crops (Operation Ranch Hand, the planes called Providers, one cute line of our aviators being "Only you can prevent a forest"). Vast areas of South Vietnam-being saved from "aggression"-were made "free fire zones" and many thousands of peasants were shot in the course of military operations and just for fun in "skunk hunts."

The 500,000-man U.S. invasion force was supplemented by mercenaries from within South Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and Australia to "pacify" the country. These troops carried out merciless "search and destroy" operations in which domestic animals and crops were destroyed, villages burned down, and large numbers of men, women and children killed or turned into homeless refugees. It was found that the "enemy" had deep roots in the population of South Vietnam, so the people were treated as an enemy population. Prisoners taken in peasant villages were systematically tortured to obtain information (in violation of international law), and were regularly killed, often by the mercenary forces under U.S. tutelage.

The final toll in Indochina will never be known, and it continues to grow as thousands have died since 1975 from the delayed setting off of some of the millions of unexploded bombs still littering the ground. But the number dead may run as high as four million, and numbers injured and traumatized also run into the millions. The number of victims of Agent Orange is large, but of zero interest to the West. The land ravaged in the chemical war of virtual ecocide may never recover.

As a victim of U.S. actions, the Indochinese catastrophe cannot be an RC holocaust (although Pol Pot's lesser killings in Cambodia are). Because of U.S. power, the strength of its anti-communist ideology, and the conformism of its ideological institutions, the murderous U.S. attack has always been treated as, at worst, a "tragic error." In RC thought, the United States was never engaged in aggression in Vietnam (this would be an oxymoron); its right to smash a peasant society by the most cruel and vile means was never called into question, nor were the policies ever called by their proper names. Liberals like Anthony Lewis and Stanley Karnow contended that we were overreaching in our efforts to do good. Karnow in 1988 was still writing that we allowed the Vietnamese people to depend too much on us.

In saying this, Karnow was equating "Vietnamese" with our puppets and mercenaries-the people who successfully fought against us and the population we attacked were reduced to non-people. And, in fact, the crucial element in U.S. perspectives on Vietnam has always been the "mere gook rule. n The "slopes," "clinks," "gooks" - small, poor, non-White peasants-who failed to accept our dictates had and have no moral standing (any more than Iraqi victims). We had a right to determine who ruled that distant country. If the population refused to accede, we had a perfect right to slaughter them. This was the under Iying imperialist-racist morality of the Vietnam War, which persists up to today.

MIAs-POWs: Beyond Chutzpah

The great preoccupation of the U.S. media and establishment with MlAs and POWs dates from 1969, when Richard Nixon latched onto this issue to stall settlement of the Vietnam War. He was successful, and even after the War the right-wing found this a useful means of preventing normalization of relations with Vietnam (as described in the excellent account by H. Bruce Franklin, M.l.A. or Myth-Making In America).

That this lunatic endeavor should have worked, and that the status of MIAs and POWs (U.S., of course-the status of Vietnamese MlAs has never arisen) has become the great "moral issue" of the post-Vietnam War era, is a product of a racist nut house. As Franklin shows, there never were many POWs and Vietnam returned all of them it could be expected to account for on schedule. Nixon's trick, of course, led to a lot more fighting and the deaths of many more U.S. military personnel than the prior total of MlAs and POWs. The hypocrisy in the pretended concern over the welfare of U.S. military personnel is also shown by the treatment of Vietnam veterans after their return to this country-they became non-persons, the government struggling to prevent their collecting money for Agent Orange damage, and the vastly more numerous veterans "Missing in America" than Missing in Action being of no interest to the leaders of the nut house.

The Indochinese victims, of course, present no moral issue at all. It is not admitted or of any interest that the United States killed and wounded millions of innocent people and virtually destroyed Indochina in an unprovoked, vicious, and cowardly aggression. These are mere gooks, who, in addition, had the temerity to stand in our way and even shoot at our armed forces occupying their country! In the RC model, we were "protecting South Vietnam" from aggression, expending our resources to save the Vietnamese and allow them democracy and self-determination, etc. Thus we are guilty of nothing and have no moral obligation for damages-but this perspective is achieved by a rewriting of history that makes Stalinist accounts of the role of Leon Trotsky look straightforward by comparison, and by moral insensitivity without limit. The spectacle of elevating our few POWs, who were instruments of a cowardly aggression that victimized millions, to the status of martyrs and victims of somebody else's pernicious behavior, all built on a system of lies and hypocrisy, is the final touch that carries us "beyond chutzpah."

Z magazine, April 1992

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