To be living in Iraq today is to live in constant and perpetual fear, unable to walk once tranquil streets, unable to shop in comfort, as always grazing bullets and bombs, unsure where explosions will go off next, afraid to be caught between warring factions. It is to experience an insecurity and a fear no American has ever felt inside our shores, of chaos, anarchy, of civil war where to be one religious sect and not another could cost you your life, and that of your family. To live in Iraq is to be subjected to daily car bombs and suicide bombers exploding in markets and streets, of having bullets whizzing by your head, of shrapnel attacking your every pore. It is to breathe the smell of death in every street corner, of feeling the concussions of bombs reverberating inside your home, and head.
To live in Iraq is to be unsure whether you will make it through the end of the day, if you will see another sunrise, another sunset. It is to see 70 percent of your children exhibiting symptoms of acute stress and traumatic disorders, not being able to sleep at night because the nightmare of what they have seen, smelled and heard cannot be exorcised from their minds. It is to see your child become a constant bed wetter due to the fear and insecurity that roams her mind. It is to see your son unable to comprehend the endemic death and bodies he sees trying to get to school. It is to witness as your child can no longer learn what she is taught, nor understand her schooling, as the fear and stress of living in civil war has become too much to bear. To live in Iraq is to realize that there are now 900,000 children who are orphans, their parents dead from a war that makes no sense, their tiny minds forced to confront the reality of being alone. It is to experience death firsthand, in large numbers, as no family left in Iraq has gone unharmed, without a murder of a relative.
To be Iraqi today is to see the most horrible deformities in young children, many mutated unlike anything seen before, a product of the invisible ghost of death afflicting expectant mothers, its radiation penetrating a body’s pores and bloodstream, traveling into placentas and embryos. To be Iraqi is to see cancer become an endemic reality, over the last fifteen years growing exponentially and methodically, inevitably claiming its victims with the tumors and infections caused by depleted uranium, becoming a silent killer that will last centuries, quite possibly altering the genetic code of your fellow citizens.
The state of Iraq has now lost 1,000,000 citizens since the beginning of America’s war of arrogant ignorance began. In four years, one million human beings have died, an average of 250,000 every year, nearly 70 people every day. Combined with the two million people who have died as a result of sanctions, it can be stated that 3 million Iraqis have died since the early 1990’s. The carnage has only intensified, with bombings routinely killing 200 Iraqis one day and 150 more another day. Assassinations of military age men has become routine, found in the morning haze, bullet holes in the back of their heads, victims of America’s counter-insurgency, El Salvador-style tactics. Over 20,000 men, most of them innocent civilians, now saturate America’s vast gulag system in Iraq, held captive without due process, existing in limbo and uncertainty, in essence kidnapped from their homes or from the street, victims of American dehumanization and ignorance of culture. How many of these men have been or are tortured in places such as Abu Ghraib? How many have died while in custody, made to disappear, forever lost in some remote mass grave?
To be in Iraq is to be living in hell on Earth, a place so devastating, so horrific, that it has become the rule, not the exception, to see feral dogs eating from dead corpses. It is to see football fields become mass graveyards, mosques become mortuaries, and how missiles and artillery destroy homes and businesses, turning lives into rubble. It is to experience the rape of your daughter, the mental retardation of your son, the humiliation of your family, the invasion into your home by American forces, the dehumanization of American boots stomping your face, placing a dark hood over your head, taking your clothes off, calling you humiliating words, treating you like an animal.
Living in Iraq is to survive day to day, roaming city streets ducking bombs and bullets, possessing little money for food, lost in a sea of fear and uncertainty, unable to find employment, having two to four hours of electricity, an unworkable sewage and garbage collection system, having to spend up to three days waiting in line in order to fill your vehicle with gasoline. It is to have the smell of death permeate your every pore every single day, the smell of bombs and smoke and bullets becoming constant reminders of your closeness with death. It is to wonder if luck and fate will decide a car bomb will blow you to bits when you walk to the market, or whether a sniper will cause your head to explode like a watermelon. It is to fear an American contractor or soldier will decide your vehicle should be machine-gunned for fun and games, because it is cool to destroy the lives of enemies that are not considered human, and whether your son and father have had enough of the occupation and humiliation and will inevitably join the resistance.
To be Iraqi is to wonder if the world has forgotten your plight, if it even cares about the fate of millions of your fellow citizens. To live in Iraq is to see the worst in the human condition, to see human wickedness stamped with the seal of the United States. It is to believe life has abandoned you, wondering what you and your people have done to deserve America’s wrath and punishment. It is to wish for the nightmare to end, to wake up to normalcy, to security and peace, just how it was before, when Iraq was a model for the Middle East and the Arab world. You want to open your eyes and hope the last two decades have been but an illusion, a hallucination that does not really exist.
Perhaps you feel hope has been lost, that wickedness has triumphed, that Iraq will never be the same, that she is no more, that the land of fertile soils and running water has ceased to be a viable society. You think the occupation will never end, that America will be your master until the last drop of oil is exhausted, that the nightmare you have lived will only dissipate when the Empire is defeated by the resistance, or by its own over-extension and ignorance. You see a one-hundred acre fortress being built, larger even than the Vatican, the largest embassy the world has ever seen quickly rising from Iraqi ground, and you know the Empire will never leave. You see permanent military bases sprouting up alongside petroleum pipelines and you notice the pillage of your land’s oil through laws enacted by the Empire’s puppets and you weep for a nation destroyed from within, damned by the devil’s excrement, cursed by Western powers who for a century have only cared for the black gold lying below your feet.
Most importantly, perhaps, you wonder where the voice of the world has gone, in her uncomfortable silence, in her complete stillness, why she does not heed your calls for help, why she fails to stop the carnage and the destruction, why she has turned a blind eye to you and your people. You look to the heavens and ask why even in Iraq’s despair and suffering the world’s people have abandoned millions of her children to the greed and hubris of the rapacious Pax Americana. You ask fate why the American people have done nothing to stop this new Holocaust from continuing, why they casually ignore the plight of Iraqis, why they continue their blissful ignorance of reality. You ask why the death of millions of Iraqis is hardly mourned, why the maiming and psychological devastation of her children is ignored, why her implosion as a state and as a people is hidden from the beautiful minds of Americans.
In the end, you ask yourself how a nation that mourns the tragic loss of thirty-two college students, with wall to wall media coverage, with flags flying at half staff nationwide, with services held from coast to coast, rarely, if ever, cares to even blink at the death and horrible misery of millions of Iraqis, or offer the same mourning, memorials and media coverage to the death, and memory, of nearly 3,500 of its sons and daughters. You ask how it is not understood by the people of the world that Iraq loses in one month what America lost in one day, on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 innocent victims of state terrorism and psychological war were murdered.
Holocaust Redux
It is reality, not hyperbole, to describe what is presently happening in Iraq as a new Holocaust, a new paradigm of devastation and destruction, of mass murder and horrific suffering. An entire nation has been made to implode, an entire society has been disemboweled, its vital organs gutted and spilled into hell on Earth. The blood of one million Iraqis covers her streets, the severed body parts of the maimed pile up on her corners, and the severed psychology of her youth lies in tatters. Iraq’s entire society is in disarray, her upper and middle classes having fled her bosom, living the life of refugees, her poor and working classes trapped in an inferno from which escape is but a wishful dream.
Disease and radiation poisoning, those silent assassins that kill and murder in clandestine pleasure, those unleashed poisons imported by the Empire, have and will continue to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s poorest and weakest individuals. For like the gas chambers of yesteryear, radiation poisoning from depleted uranium, along with the Empire’s destruction of sanitation, sewer and civil infrastructure, will, in the end, kill countless and as yet untold numbers of Iraqis, most forced to suffer sickness and cancer, deformity and miscarriage, misery and death.
For a Holocaust does not need toxic chambers to count its dead, nor crematoriums to hide its victims. It does not depend on concentration camps to starve its prisoners, nor barbed wire to hide the truth. Deadly poison can be released into the air, penetrating soil, crops, water and food, slowly penetrating human bodies, killing from within. It can be created by the destruction of the infrastructure needed to contain and fight off infection, disease and outbreaks. Holocaust exists in sanctions that refuse to let in vital medicines and food, it exists in making the Iraqi nation itself into an enormous concentration camp. Holocaust can be flamed by the dropping of bombs, missiles or artillery into homes and neighborhoods. Holocaust can be created, molded and furthered by causing civil war among religious sects, using counter-insurgency machinations to divide and conquer, caring nothing for the plight of millions caught in the crosshairs of a societal collapse engineered by the Empire’s war architects. In the end, the result is the same, whether a Holocaust is molded by Nazis or nurtured by the Empire itself. The only reality that changes is the method to the madness and the cast of characters for whom the flame of humanity has long since ceased to exist.
What the world is seeing today, for those few who care to see and disturb their beautiful minds, is a carnage and a devastation that fits the pattern of Holocaust throughout humankind’s brief reign on the planet. The Iraq Holocaust, while still not apparent to all, while still hidden from the conscious of the world, while still taking place even today, is but another manifestation of a pattern that is all too familiar to the human condition.
For no ethnic minority or religious group can claim a monopoly on Holocaust, no matter how convenient it has become, no matter how beneficial its incantation and remembrance may be. Holocaust is an all-inclusive devastation, a human wickedness that preys upon all peoples, throughout all time and space, whether they be from 20th century Armenia, Korea, Manchuria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or World War II’s wickedness, which killed tens of millions in Russia and more than a dozen in Germany and Eastern Europe. The term Holocaust is not exclusive to any one particular group, nor can its use be defined by Empire's propagandists or by history’s victors.
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