One of the great things about being American is we're just lucky. Lots of countries have killed millions of people, and it made their families really angry and sad. So the countries sometimes had to feel bad about it. But when WE'VE done it, we've always been lucky enough to do it to people who turned out not to mind being killed. So no harm done.
Most recently, Steve Inskeep of NPR pointed out that Afghans haven't gotten all bent out of shape about a U.S. soldier massacring sixteen of them, because "human life is already cheap" way over there.
That's great journalism. However, it would have been even better if Inskeep had found out whether life is not just cheap in Afghanistan, but also plentiful, like it was in Vietnam:
WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.
And what about Iraqis? Were they whiny bitches when we killed them? No way:
FRED KAGAN, ARCHITECT OF IRAQ "SURGE": If anyone has seen pictures of Ramadi or Fallujah, they looked like Stalingrad. Cities absolutely crushed...
The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage...the Iraqis don’t on the whole say "darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses." They sort of accept that.
We know this is correct because Iraqis felt the same way in the twenties when they were being slaughtered by the British:
"The natives of these tribes love fighting for fighting's sake," Chief of Air Staff Hugh Trenchard assured Parliament. "They have no objection to being killed." The military's argument was that, though the often indiscriminate air attacks might perturb some civilized folks back in London, such acts were viewed differently by the Arabs. As one British commander observed, "'[Shiekhs]...do not seem to resent...that women and children are accidentally killed by bombs."
Then we come to Koreans. Here's a review of Curtis LeMay's autobiography, in which LeMay explained why massive carpet bombing of North Korea during the Korean War didn't make them surrender:
LeMay [argues] that bombardment failed because of an "undying Oriental philosophy and fanaticism." He says, "Human attrition means nothing to such people," that their lives are so miserable on earth that they look forward with delight to a death which promises them "everything from tea parties with long dead grandfathers down to their pick of all the golden little dancing girls in Paradise."
Of course, all this might make it seem like it's an Eastern Hemisphere thing, which it's not. People in the Western Hemisphere have never minded being killed by America, as U.S. soldiers have observed:
Marine major Julian Smith testified that the "racial psychology" of the "poorer class of Nicaraguans" made them "densely ignorant...A state of war to them is a normal condition." Along the same lines, Colonel Robert Denig observed in his diary, "Life to them is cheap" ... When asked if he ever witnessed American brutality in Haiti, General Ivan Miller replied that "you have to remember that what we consider brutality among people in the United States is different from what they consider brutality."
Finally, in Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson investigated and found out that his African slaves didn't feel emotions like white people do:
Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.
Other scholars discovered that Africans were less physically sensitive too:
Negroes...are void of sensibility to a surprising degree...what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.
So there you have it: maybe we've done some things that would have been bad if they'd happened to sensitive people like us, but in each case we've lucked out. Right now I'm getting the feeling that very soon Iranians will turn out not to mind being killed.
HA HA BUT SERIOUSLY: I've sent email to Steve Inskeep with all of these quotes and asked for his reaction. I'm especially curious what he thinks about the fact that in 2012 a journalist (him) was expressing a sentiment that in every other case came from the people directly inflicting the suffering.
The contempt for the human lives who didn't win the lottery of being born (white) in the United States covered above is something so blind and powerful that it cannot persist without eventually being applied at home.
What a coincidence -- just yesterday I reviewed Edward Said's 4-part series on 'Orientalism as a Tool of Colonialism' which examines the peculiar, ingrained western attitude that has ascribed a highly stylized, mythic and singularly universal set of characteristics to the peoples and cultures of Arab & Persian peoples in the Middle/Far East and Mediteranean Africa -- despite Orientalism's abject failure to accurately account for the many varied customs, traditions, culture & unique plurality of ethnic, tribal, national, regional, religious & political identities of such a wide segment of peoples. But it has both made inexplicable AND served to facilitate the western-anglo-euro impetus for exploitation, war & conquest over the past several centuries, continuing today.
I highly recommend it for the insights Said brings to the discussion.
But My GawD what a contemptable, smug condescension & arrogance is revealed in the 'news' stories that discount the ability of the non-white 'other' to feel loss, pain and misery.
I'm sure you've all heard that old ME saying, "My father rode a camel, I rode in a car, my son flies in an airplane, and my grandson will ride a camel." Or something along those lines.
When the big wheel turns, and the ME is riding camels....America will be nothing but a grease spot in the annals of history.
General Patton wrote:
Also, I'd rather be Brown in America than White in Iraq. Or anything in Iraq.
Racism isn't new in Iraq. Blacks were brought here as slaves from Africa more than 1,000 years ago to work for wealthy landowners in Basra, where most of Iraq's black population still lives. Today, one of the insults sometimes hurled at black people is "Abd," which means servant or slave in Arabic, said Razzaq, who has founded a political organization called the Free Iraqis Movement to press for equal rights for black people.
Its goal includes amending Iraq's constitution to ban discrimination against blacks, who Razzaq says number about 2 million here, and getting blacks elected to the national parliament.
He admits the effort so far has been frustrating. The movement is too broke to have a website, and it is having trouble generating support from Iraqis who fear rocking the boat during these politically volatile times. A recent visit to Baghdad to lobby political leaders to support his cause was futile, with most people advising Razzaq that his movement could be seen as sowing divisiveness at a time when Iraqis need to set aside their ethnic and religious differences to recover from the war.
Another problem, according to Razzaq, is that many of Iraq's most powerful people still think of blacks as servants. Some tribal sheiks still keep blacks as slaves, he says.
Three things struck me, though: first, Iraq used to be a wealthy, unified nation, with one of the highest standards of living in the region. In terms of education, employment, health care, the state ensured an excellent quality of life for most citizens. I know people who went to work there during the 1970s and 1980s and described it as "paradise". It was just a beautiful country, one of the most beautiful in the world. Now look at it.
Second, the man said, "we want to be like the Christians"; is he not aware that Iraq's formerly large, thriving Christian population, which is one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, has literally been decimated?
Third, not that it makes it any less cruel, but the designator "abd" (slave) doesn't specifically refer to skin color, since it isn't used against all black-skinned Iraqis. Iraq is a tribal society, and the tribe has become even more important with the collapse of the state. The power and status of individuals is commensurate with the power and status of their tribe, and vice versa. The marginalization of these people is a consequence of being descendants of slaves and therefore having no tribe to back them up. It seems some of them intend to compensate for the lack of tribal unity by joining together as a political force. More power to them.
I found it ironic, that so many of them were inspired by the victory of Obama. As though the color of his skin would change anything for Iraqi blacks (any more than for American blacks, for that matter).
Thanks to the American invasion and occupation, the lives of all Iraqis have been shattered, and Iraq has been destroyed. The survivors are forced to fight each other for the very little that's left. They should expect nothing from the US. regardless of who's president.
Americans DO seem to have a strange, obsessive fear of death. As if, somehow, they might avoid it. I suppose that viewing other cultures without similar fears makes those other cultures seem "odd."
It might be that Americans have an instinctive fear of karmic balancing in the next life.
