Last night, I was watching the tube and just about ready to hit the hay when I began my last sweep through the channels before retiring to bed. You know just in case something really unusual was on that would never be on again like the episode where Scratchy finally gets Itchy (Wow! They'll never let us show that again. Not in a million years).
I happen across a documentary about genocide on PBS and it is just starting. Drat the luck! This is something I want to see. I realize that this puts me among the .0067% of the population (which probably includes all of you as well) who actually would be disappointed that we can't stay up and watch a show about mass killing.
I elected to indulge myself and watch the first half hour of the show. Now I fancy myself a decent student of history and in particular the 20th century and felt I had a good grasp of the genocidal acts in recent history including the Holocaust, the Ukrainian famine of the 30's, the Armenians in the 20's, Cambodia, and so. But I was struck by the first two subjects of last night's show and how little I really knew about them.
The first was China. In 1959-1960 as part of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" around two million Chinese peasants were more or less intentionally starved to death in an effort to revolutionize and modernize Chinese agriculture. Two million.
The next segment was on Cambodia which I was much more familiar with. However, if you stop and really consider the numbers what occurred there from 75'-79' under the Khmer Rouge is mind boggling.. Estimates are that one to three million people were exterminated in the "killing fields". That in and of itself is horrifying but you also must account for the fact that Cambodia's population in 1975 was around ten million. So somewhere between ten and thirty percent of the population was eliminated in under five years.
Numbers like these are almost impossible to comprehend and to it is difficult to think of the immense human suffering that resulted from these acts of genocide. But how many Americans today even have the faintest idea of what transpired in these countries in the not so distant past? I'm sure that most college students would be able to tell you all about the four students shot at Kent State protesting the Vietnam War and the massacre of hundreds(possibly as high as five hundred) of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. And indeed they both were tragic and regrettable incidents. But what do they know of the support from North Vietnam and China that fueled the Khmer Rouge insurgency or of the fact that when the US decided to wash it's hands of Southeast Asia and refused to send supplies to the Lan Nol government it directly led to the murderous Khmer Rouge seizing control? Do they know that the Khmer Rouge were French educated Communists intent of imposing their view of a Communist utopia at any cost? That as horrible as the Holocaust was it is easily eclipsed by the numbers murdered in Communist genocides throughout the century?
To turn the Gospel on it's head a bit, it seems at time that Americans(and the West in whole) can notice the little piece of dust in our own eyes but yet ignore the big piece of wood in the eyes of others.
Today, you can see an example of this in the clamor for an investigation into the "massacre" at Jenin. The total numbers of dead vary between fifty one and fifty three in the reports I've seen. According to the Israelis forty four of the fifty one were armed fighters and the other seven were civilians whose deaths they regret. The Palestinian's acknowledge that some of the dead were fighting but claim more were civilians. The Israeli Army reported twenty three soldiers killed in the fighting. Think about it.
A fierce battle that lasted for days involving tanks, helicopter gunships, RPGs, automatic weapons, and God knows what else in a densely packed urban environment and we need to investigate to determine why a few dozen civilians may have been killed? How about a study to look at how the IDF was able to carry out such an operation with such a minimal loss of civilian life?
I daresay that in the annals of modern military history I cannot think of one instance of an army entering a city to engage enemy forces in intense firefights and having so few "collateral" causalities. The fact that twenty three Israelis soldiers were killed is a testament to the care that the IDF took to avoid civilian causalities. Kicking doors in one at a time and rousting out those inside is a much more dangerous task then simply leveling buildings with tanks and mowing down those inside as they flee. Or surrounding a city and leveling it with artillery and aerial bombing as the Russians did to Grozny not that many years ago.
Why is it that the intentional deaths of millions driven by a inhumane ideology are so easily forgotten and never called to accountability (how many Americans who have supported Communism have ever admitted their culpability in the horrors the movement spawned worldwide?) while any incident by the US or it's allies(now pretty much limited to Britain and Israel) that results in any loss of live is magnified and never allowed to rest no matter how unintentional it was or how many times we admit our fault and apologize it?
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