3. 1945-1990: Third World Holocaust?
The scale of the death toll from these interventions is staggering. William Blum, another ex-State Department official, describes the vast loss of life resulting from post-1945 military interventionism in the Third World as a full-scale “American holocaust.” [Killing Hope: CIA and US Military Interventions Since World War II (Zed, 2003)]
How many innocent civilians died as a consequence of these military interventions? A detailed break-down of figures can be found in Unpeople, by the British historian Mark Curtis, a former research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Curtis’ conservative calculations confirm that Britain has been complicit in the deaths of over 10 million “unpeople”, expendable people from far-off foreign lands whose lives are worthless compared to the significance of a specific set of overriding strategic and economic interests.
Here’s another overall estimate from the American development expert, Dr J. W. Smith, director of the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona:
“No society will tolerate it if they knew that they... were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990.” [J. W. Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (Arizona: Institute for Economic Democracy, 2003)]
Dr. Smith’s figures, it should be noted, point not only to a core of up to 15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, but a further unknown 100 million plus who died as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of peripheral economies.
We do not recognize the post-war period as a “holocaust.” But it was only a few years after the appalling genocide against the Jews was revealed to the world that the dictum “never again” was forgotten, a pointless platitude by which to ignore the pleas of millions. The reasons we do not recognize this period as a “holocaust” are several. Firstly, our political culture does not really acknowledge the scale of the interventions that our military intelligence services conducted across the South. Secondly, consequently, such figures are totally unheard of. Thirdly, our political culture is not equipped to comprehend these 70 plus military interventions as manifestations of a single expanding system. Rather, we are accustomed to thinking about our history, about these events, about politics, in a fragmented and disjointed manner. Yet it is precisely this political culture that means that our history, perhaps even our historical complicity in this “hidden holocaust”, remains invisible to the majority of citizens.
4. Covering Iraq
The same political culture that mystifies and obscures the systematization and globalization of genocidal violence in the emergence, expansion and consolidation of the modern world system -- not only since 1492, but even continuing past 1945 until now -- means that even current events are difficult for us to truly assimilate and understand. This is particularly true of our involvement in Iraq. A fragmented and disjointed method of analysis ingrained in our political culture, incapable of serious or sustained self-critique and self-reflection, prevents us from envisioning the Iraq Holocaust as it truly is.
For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. Western pundits, politicians and political analysts routinely debate the emergence of a new form of American empire after 9/11, particularly in relation to Iraq. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.
A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that some scholars consider to be genocidal. While not attempting to actually resolve the questions here, if this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations in the context of a renewed exploration of the history and theory of imperialism and genocide.
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