Innocence in the Time of Cholera

Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat's Dream
And finally cholera broke out in Baghdad. Nothing to worry about of course! The New York Times won’t ruin your breakfast and the BBC will respect your supper. Too much violence on TV already; better protect the child within our sophisticated intellect from these unnecessary details. Nobody needs to know those 1.2 million Iraqi deaths as a result of the illegal war of aggression in 2003. Numbers don’t count, do they? What a formidable instrument is our brain. We can’t deal with the responsibility of genocide so denial becomes a self-defense instinct, at least for those still in good faith. But are we really innocent? Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. He recently wrote: "The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area. It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won't we take responsibility?" Rockwell titles his denounce, None Dare Call It Genocide. Maybe the time has come for all of us to put aside our worn out ideological uniforms and to make alliances with all those willing to take responsibility for this abomination unleashed in our name, with our money, from leaders we elected and re-elected....
continua / continued

None Dare Call It Genocide

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

... Well, it's about time that we think about the numbers, even though the US military has decided that body counts are not worth their time. Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK, has just completed a detailed and rigorous survey of Iraqis. In the past, the company's results have been touted by the Bush administration whenever the data looks favorable to the US cause. But their latest report received virtually no attention in the US. Here is the grisly bottom line: more than one million people have been murdered in Iraq since the US invasion, according to the ORB. The total number of dead exceeds the hugely well-publicized Rwandan genocide in 1994 (...) So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the 10 previous years (...) The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area. It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? ...

continua / continued