I wondered then and I wonder now, how did they live there? How did they stay as the ash from the ovens fell over the city? Moreover, how do they continue to live there with its dark history? It is an easy question to ask, and probably an even easier question to answer. As I write this from my apartment in Tacoma, WA, I look out my living room window at Mount Rainier from which this city gets its name. Originally “known as Tahoma or Tacoma, from the Puyallup word tacobet ("mother of waters"),”[i] the mountain has since been renamed Mount Rainier. It reminds me that my hometown, which I am particularly fond of and that I have a misplaced affinity for its blue collar sentimentality, is here because of conquest, Manifest Destiny, and genocide. Succinctly, I am here because of a holocaust. I can sit here and unflinchingly sing the praises of a town built because of the eradication of the indigenous people while simultaneously criticizing the people of Dachau. Now, there is a longer timeline here, so I can make claims to that the collective amnesia has had more time to set in, but really as I type this I hear Jen and Nate in my head calling shenanigans. We do not need time for the amnesia to set in, we turn our heads and ignore atrocities as they are committed. Hence, the amnesia is virtually instantaneous.
If Iraqi Body Count and its lack of publicity (though the fatalites of our soldiers, currently around 2400, gets plenty of press when it hits the arbitrary marks) is not enough for you, then take a look at the estimated casualties from UN sanctions against Iraq from the first Gulf War until the second: “Critics of the sanctions say that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, disproportionately children, died as a result of them, [2] although certain skeptics claim the numbers to be less. [3] [4][5] UNICEF has put the number of child deaths to 500,000.”[ii] The now famous quote from Madeleine Albright that “we think the price is worth it” pretty much sums up our culture’s feelings on the subject. That we are willing to strangle another country so that the impoverished die from disease, malnutrition, and starvation, is indicative of the fact that we value “the abstract over the particular: of production over life; of economic…systems over living beings.”[iii] We are unperturbed by the deaths of these people, mostly children. Is it because they are brown? Is it because they live on the other side of the planet? Or is it because “every holocaust looks different, depending on the class to which the observer belongs.”[iv] To the class benefitting from such atrocities, do they even appear to be such? Can we distinguish these atrocities from the tide of history, from the progress of civilization where the conquered are subjected to the whims of the conquerors? Maybe for the class benefitting “(t)he holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.”[v]
We have sites like Iraqi Body Count because there is something of interest in Iraq: oil. We are not overly concerned about the conflict Sudan, AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, much less human rights violations in China (Ramsey Clark, attorney general during LBJ’s administration, stated that the purpose of US foreign policy is “to dominate for the exploitation of resources,”[vi] which is probably why we and/or the media are not particularly concerned with these places).
What strikes me when thinking about censorship in China is its heavy handedness. It seems to me that if you limit what people can read, say, or do, you create a black market for these things, you fetishize them. People will search these things out and eventually form a counterculture or resistance around what is banned. Whereas, if you hide them in plain sight, so to speak, then people are just as easily going to be unconcerned or unbothered by them. This is shown by our government’s making public record such things as Project for the New American Century, School of the Americas/Western Hemishphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or simply by the decriminilization of lighter drugs in Holland and parts of Canada. It is no longer as compelling for most people if it is out in the open, it becomes transparent so that it is no longer noticed. It is no accident that the current administration, while having the reputation for being one of the most secretive administrations this country has ever seen, has had leaks about such things as NSA wiretaps, the collecting of virtually everyone’s phone records, secret prisons around the world, falsification of intelligence that led us to war, and so and so forth. These things were not simply leaked, but the battlefield (being public opinion), was softened first, then we were made aware of these things. And, while the president’s poll numbers are significantly down, he and the rest of the people in power have yet to be held accountable for any number of illegal acts.
Joseph Goebbels, mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda machine, understood how to keep the masses in a perpetual state of agitated content: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”[vii] Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What sounds even more familiar is this: “The broadcasting programmes need to be put together in such a way that while they still cater for sophisticated tastes, they are also pleasing and accessible to less demanding listeners [or viewers, I suppose]…They should offer an intelligent and skillful blend of what is informative, stimulating, relaxing, and entertaining. Of these, relaxation deserves special care…giving them a right to recuperate and refresh themselves during the few hours when they are off work.”[viii] Distract us with an enemy, placate (anesthetize) us at home with entertainment, and conceal in plain sight exactly what you are doing.
So, my question is, if there was something occurring right now that was analagous to the Holocaust, would we notice? Would we even care? When I go to work tonight at the bar, people are going to be more than willing to talk about the beautiful weather we are having, LeBron James hitting a game winning shot, The Da Vinci Code’s luke warm reception at Cannes, but are we, as they sip their $8 cocktails and as I mix them, really wanting, even if we are capable, to discuss the potential that we are all Germans living under the shadow of that wall?
[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions
[iii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 601, Derrick Jensen
[iv] ibid. Pg. 592
[v] ibid. Pg. 593-594
[vi] ibid. Pg. 577
[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie
[viii] The Culture of Make Believe, pg. 594, Derrick Jensen
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