Anthony Blinken is uncomfortable at the podium as he delivers a lengthy speech at NATO while the Ukraine war continues and the West’s response continues to not only confuse the Ukrainian leader but also most people who are struggling to understand how the war has got to where it is today, with the latest massacres shocking the world.

What Blinken didn’t make a mention of was what happened on the same day in 1994, which was the start of the Rwandan genocide – a colossal failure of both the UN and NATO. Blinken spoke about the UN’s decision to suspend Russia from the U.S. Human Rights Council.

The Rwandan Genocide is important to remember as the similarities of the West’s activities in Ukraine today can be compared, in that giants in the UN and NATO like the U.S. remain as pusillanimous as ever towards actually fighting a real war for the rights and principles that they supposedly stand for.

In Rwanda, the CIA-backed English-speaking Tutsis entered the north of the country with a disinformation campaign which installed terror in the hearts of peasant Hutus who took to slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with a common farmyard tool. There really isn’t an example of how information or disinformation can play such a decisive role in a war going one way or the other than Rwanda, which the West is entirely responsible for.

When the real killing started in great numbers, the Americans were nowhere to be seen. Clinton, after the PR disaster of Somalia just a few months earlier, pulled back from getting involved in Rwanda and the UN and NATO followed. The UN did have troops in Rwanda but the role of their soldiers is both polemic and ineffective.

On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their plane prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda – sparking the Rwandan genocide.

The parallel with Ukraine is chilling. It’s often forgotten how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in 2014, which in many ways was a similar catalyst to the fighting in Ukraine reaching a point, where Russia decided to enter the country and take control on February 24^th of this year.

The West blames Russia for the attack on the civilian airliner although the evidence is not entirely conclusive. The Rwandans themselves (the Tutsi-led government) concluded in 2010 that the missile which shot down the Rwandan president’s plane was almost certainly from the hardcore element of the Hutu army which believed the President had sold them out and brokered a peace, allowing Tutsis to return to Rwanda and make claims on land.

But on the 7^th of April 2022, Anthony Blinken made no historical references as he announced even more sanctions against Russia in a war which America hopes will be dragged out for months, in the belief that this will have an impact on Putin, impacting his ability to remain firm when the negotiations start. It wasn’t only the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide which Blinken decide not to mention (probably not wanting to remind the press pack gathered there of both Bill Clinton’s huge erroneous foreign policy play which led to 800,000 dead), but he also chose not to mention Europe’s failure to stop buying Russian oil and gas, which in many ways means that these countries are actually funding Putin’s operation in Ukraine.

If EU countries can’t actually stop buying Russian oil, then the farce of this war will continue for month and perhaps even years to come. Equally, if America’s role is to continue funding Ukrainian soldiers without genuinely wanting to negotiate peace (as the truth is that Blinken and his colleagues believe that a long war is a winning strategy for them), then all talks of peace and negotiating for it are folly. America got the war that it wanted in Ukraine, which is bite-sized and doesn’t involve the threat to American lives which they have been preparing for since 2014 when their own guy overthrew Russia’s chosen leader. We really shouldn’t be surprised by anything other than Blinken’s ability, rather than Biden’s to “fuck things up”.

When I initially read “The Politics of Genocide” [2010] by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson I was easily able to assimilate their critique of the brazen misapplication of the term “genocide” to events in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Kosovo, since I was familiar with those issues and had worked at the Hague Tribunal, the place where the propaganda was ultimately reformatted to resemble authoritative, quasi-judicial court verdicts. But like most members of the general public, I thought that those authors’ deconstruction of the Rwandan conflict was exaggerated and tendentious because I knew practically nothing about it, aside from the steady stream of horror stories that were fed to news consumers in the 1990s (the authors fittingly called it “enduring lies” in a related volume). To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Rwanda was literally a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and that made it quite easy to fool all of us. In retrospect, the Rwandan pattern should have raised red flags for adhering too closely to the Bosnian script. But viewed in a factual vacuum and without any particular local expertise, the torrent of Rwandan genocidal allegations appeared largely credible and indisputable. Exactly as the “Srebrenica genocide” narrative must appear to most superficially informed members of the public.

It is only with the publication of Herman and Peterson’s meticulously researched and persuasively argued book that critical questions about Rwanda began to arise. The authors argued that the label “genocide,” far from being merely descriptive or following the legal criteria set by the UN convention, was in fact highly politicised and generally used by governments, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfered with the imperial designs of the global West. Two sets of rules govern the application of the term “genocide.” It is seldom used when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is applied almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the global West and its business or political interests. After removing media blinkers to study more closely the factual background of the Rwandan affair and applying Herman and Peterson’s analytical framework, events there came into focus and the received narrative about Rwanda was no longer making sense.

A recent reminiscence by Phil Taylor and John Philpot on Global Research about the judicial lynching of Rwandan Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who recently passed away in prison after enduring many years of incarceration for his alleged role in genocidal killings, recalled not just the sordid impact of propaganda in misshaping public perceptions of important contemporary political issues. More importantly, it highlighted the squalid part played by “gekaufte Justiz,” as Udo Ulfkotte would undoubtedly have called it if he were alive to write a book on this subject today, in seemingly confirming and reinforcing propaganda’s toxic lies.

Taylor and Philpot demonstrate that Bagasora was railroaded by the ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania, where he and scores of other Rwandan officials were tried. ICTR is the somewhat lesser-known but equally pernicious mirror image of the more infamous ICTY, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Attorney Christopher Black, with hands-on experience in both the Hague and Arusha, is unequivocal: “Bagasora was framed up. Not guilty of anything, but this is true of every one of the accused at the Rwanda Tribunal. They were all framed up.”

Black describes the technology of judicial lynching: “The prosecution targeted selected people to try to paint a picture of a government, so a few officers, politicians, party people, administrators, any Hutu intellectuals, etc. were indicted. They concocted stories and charges, all in the name of propaganda to justify the war the West conducted against Rwanda to overthrow its government.

“In 2007 thirty-seven of the [Rwanda] accused sent a letter to the UN declaring that they were political prisoners of the UN. Just think of that, the UN holding political prisoners. And it is a fact that they were.”

Black continues: “At the time I tried to get some of the accused at the ICTY [the Hague Tribunal] to join this action, but received no replies from anyone. The lawyers at the ICTY were sweetheart lawyers for the most part, except in the case of Milosevic.”

Referring to the structure of the pseudo-judicial twins, ICTR and ICTY, Black says that they are “identical in the way they chose people to target, the way they concocted evidence and arranged witnesses, in the way they tried to ensure that only weak lawyers were allowed to defend the accused (a constant battle at the ICTR), and in their control by NATO personnel at every level and in every department. They had the same prosecutor in charge of both [Carla Del Ponte], judges that went back and forth between the two, the same appeal chamber, etc. etc. Hans Köchler’s book about the two tribunals, “Global Justice or Global Revenge”, describes it best. He showed how the judges were all finally approved by the U.S.” Hence, one supposes, the indicative note in the blurb to Köchler’s book, that “the author’s main intention is to reflect upon the legal and philosophical foundations of international criminal law in the context of politics.”

“The two ad hoc tribunals were (and still are in the “Mechanism”) entirely show tribunals created to run show trials to frame up scapegoats for the crimes of the NATO countries involved,” Black concludes with understandable bitterness in his private communication with this author.

Going back to the Herman and Peterson analysis, both “tribunals” have been essential tools in perpetuating crude propaganda fabrications, that otherwise would probably have remained ephemeral, about the Bosnia and Rwanda conflicts by repackaging them in deceptive judicial wrapping. These sorry excuses for “international courts” are not merely a disservice to jurisprudence, to which they have inflicted incalculable damage, whose full scope will become apparent only with the passage of time. Inexcusably, they are guilty also of an appalling distortion of the historical record, arguably an even more grievous offence that may take much longer to rectify.

Following the grim discovery of mass graves from Catholic-run schools for indigenous children, churches across Canada are being torched to the ground. Instead of the liberal government of Justin Trudeau harshly condemning the attacks, however, it has sent a weak and passive message to the arsonists.

There is no doubt that the history of Aboriginal children, physically removed from their parents and forced to attend state-run residential in Canada from the 1880s until 1996, is an appallingly tragic one. Inside of the Catholic schools, an estimated 150,000 attendees were indoctrinated with the new social and cultural values of the dominant Euro-Christian nation. Over the years, many of the children were sexually abused, tortured and even murdered in these “central training industrial schools,” criminal actors in what can be best described as the cultural genocide of an entire race of people.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada put out a lengthy report on the findings, as well as its recommendations for addressing the grievances. Yet for whatever reason, the Canadian media shied away from the story, possibly because it was too keenly aware exactly how complicit the government was in the egregious acts. Could that be the reason that not a single person has been put on trial for these crimes against humanity? Whatever the case may be, last month the suppressed news exploded to the surface like a volcano after nearly 1,000 unmarked graves were discovered on the territory of a former residential school in Saskatchewan province.

As a result of the horrific revelations, which have been an open secret among journalists for many years, a proverbial bomb has exploded in the lap of the Catholic Church as dozens of churches in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia have suffered arson attacks, while many more have been vandalized.

17th Catholic Church burned in Canada. https://t.co/WtI0NgBZG6

— Xavier1017 (@Xavier10171) July 10, 2021

Equally problematic, however, has been the tepid and late response from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party to these acts of wanton violence. Although the attacks on Catholic churches in Canada have been happening since around mid-June, Trudeau waited until July 2 to give his first comments on them. And those comments failed to carry the necessary ring of authority that lets the perpetrators understand in no uncertain terms that acts of arson would not be tolerated.

“It is unacceptable and wrong that acts of vandalism and arson are being seen across the country, including against Catholic churches,” Trudeau said, in remarks that amount to little more than a slap on the wrist to the perpetrators.

“I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic Church,” the Prime Minister continued. “It is real, and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians.”

When the moment called for a firm denunciation against arson, which ranks as one of the gravest crimes as it subjects a large swath of the population to grave danger, Trudeau provided guarded milquetoast criticism, which have done nothing to prevent the criminal acts from reoccurring, it should be noted. Moreover, such a kid gloves response will be replicated by other state officials, eager to trumpet the official line.

Needless to say, when Harsha Walia, the head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said in a tweet “Burn it all down” in response to news that two more churches were torched in British Columbia (and without any punishment from Twitter to date, by the way), the conservative response came fast and furious. Critics implored their audiences to imagine the government’s response had a Muslim mosque, for example, suffered from such a barbaric attack. The predictable reaction from the government would be – correctly – to label those acts as “hate crimes.”

So Gerry, defending the “burning churches is cool” crowd?

— Terry Glavin 格立文 (@TerryGlavin) July 6, 2021

Terry Glavin, a columnist for National Post, took issue with Walia’s despicable call for violence, and found himself ridiculed by none other than Gerry Butts, who served as the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from November 4, 2015 until his resignation in 2019.

In response to Glavin’s question if burning down churches “is cool,” Butts responded, “No Terry, it is not. Though it may be understandable.” It seems that attacks on Christian churches simply do not fall under the category of “hate crimes.”

Here we have, yet again, Canadian Liberals, in truly selective fashion, finding ways to justify acts of violence as a form of protest against historic crimes. This very same strange proclivity for denouncing law and order more than the initial crime itself was first popularized in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, which saw one liberal run state after another allow the mob to run wild.

In the city of Seattle, an entire city block was declared an autonomous “police free zone,” which lasted right up until the moment people started getting killed; in Portland, Oregon, the incompetent mayor, Ted Wheeler, denied police the use of CS tear gas after a protester group filed a complaint. Portland police, who have had everything including Molotov cocktails hurled at them, said it was their last form of non-lethal methods for confronting the crowds; in St. Louis, Mark and Patricia McCloskey brandished firearms and pointed them at a group of protesters who trespassed onto their property. Last month, under threat of felony firearm charges, the couple pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges, yet was still required to surrender their firearms.

Now these same mindless liberal tendencies, first baked in the American madhouse, are being exported abroad to other Liberal hotspots. Canada, with spineless and spiritless Trudeau at the helm, has been an enthusiastic student of these decaying ways. Yes, the violation of human rights is very serious business, but to allow the passions of the mob to run wild as a form of “reconcilitation” is a recipe for the complete breakdown of society. Meanwhile, there are already definite warning signs that the American ‘woke’ mentality has moved across the ocean where it is now taking root in England and Western Europe.

It is the prediction here that the West is on the cusp of a massive right-wing backlash from these reckless liberal policies that refuse law and order its rightful place in the political establishment. Whether that backlash will wear the jackboots on cobblestone brand of fascism is anybody’s guess, but at this point it’s either a return to ‘strong conservative values’ or the complete self-destruction of the Western nations, whose fate will be determined by the destructive mob.

July 11 this year will mark the 26^th anniversary of the tragic events that took place in 1995 in the east Bosnian district of Srebrenica. With each passing year the ceremony loses some of its luster and pomp, as genocide fatigue sets in. The inquirer into these matters will get radically different answers and interpretations, mainly depending on the ethnicity of the local informant. As Diana Johnstone accurately observed, in the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be purely tribal.

That axiom of Balkan epistemology being out of the way, the question still remains whether there are any solid facts, or “hard data points,” to – as my contracts professor in law school used to say – “hang your hat on.” Regrettably, again, it really depends on who you talk to.

For the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srebrenica has been successfully shaped into an identitarian founding myth, a rallying cry and a device potently used by their self-perpetuating governing class in Sarajevo to drive them into a sheep corral of which they, the elite, would be self-appointed gatekeepers. For the NATO crowd, Srebrenica has been a rich political bonanza, a gift that literally keeps on giving. By driving what at present appears as an eternal cleavage between the two largest Bosnian communities, the Serbs and the Muslims, Srebrenica has provided the Western alliance with a seemingly unassailable pretext to keep strategic Bosnia under its interminable protectorate lest, so their narrative goes, the hostile ethnicities quickly go for each other’s throats, causing another ugly carnage that the decent and civilised folks in Washington, London, and Brussels simply could not abide. But more realistically, the bonanza that Srebrenica has given to those decent folks is just the right rationale that they had been looking for. After Srebrenica, they may wage their “right to protect” [R2P] interventions wherever a poor and defenceless nation catches their eye for sitting on a pot of gold, oil, strategic minerals, or anything else they may want to help themselves to, or its ruler become disobedient and turns into a “dictator who is killing his own people.” SCF readers are too sophisticated to require specific illustrations, but just for the record Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, and Libya come to mind.

What is supposed to distinguish Srebrenica from other ugly episodes of the civil wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia is its unique status as the “first genocide in Europe since the end of World War II”. (What Professor Lemkin might have to say about it, for obvious reasons, we shall never know.) That status was first conferred on Srebrenica by the Western media, reporting in lockstep on the conflict in Bosnia. Right on cue, it was later duly confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), an ad hoc court which, many suspect, was specifically set up for that very purpose. Contemporary media charges of “genocide” in which 8,000 Muslim POW “men and boys” were slaughtered by Serb forces after marching into Srebrenica received miraculous retroactive judicial confirmation once ICTY got seized of the matter and began delivering its boiler plate verdicts.

In the event, ICTY verdicts became an effective substitute for hard facts which they supposedly were based on, much as gold paper certificates, in the perception of simpleminded investors, became more solid than physical gold itself. The advocates of parliamentary “Srebrenica genocide resolutions” and “Srebrenica genocide denial laws” in various countries have been quite insouciant about providing hard facts to sustain their claims; after all, the last time we checked, it was still the rule that the burden of proof was on whoever was asserting something. But if it ever existed in the normative universe of the decent folks of the Western world, that rule was notably suspended in the case of Srebrenica. According to the Srebrenica lex specialis, an ICTY verdict is all the evidence needed to prove the commission of the horrendous crime of genocide, and Srebrenica genocide denial laws which are already on the books in numerous countries are conveniently applied to shut up anyone who undertakes to question such a course of reasoning. Never mind that the Hague Tribunal itself is an institution of questionable legitimacy, the authorisation to set up a court not being found anywhere in the UN Charter. Even to raise that issue is itself a violation of the genocide denial rules.

Issues such as whether or not genocide occurred in Srebrenica in July of 1995, and whether or not the Hague Tribunal is a legitimate forum entitled to pronounce on the subject, have been discussed and analysed from every angle ad nauseam (here, here, and here). In fact, hard data points challenging the Srebrenica genocide narrative do abound. There are strong indications that autopsy reports which supposedly document the execution of the “8,000 men and boys” are not all that they are cracked up to be. The DNA evidence subsequently summoned to fill that gap and prove the massive scope of prisoner executions, on closer examination, also raises more questions than it answers. Inconvenient evidence has also emerged of huge combat casualties that have been stealthily incorporated into the execution statistics in order to bolster the genocide death toll (also here). Though much of the scepticism regarding the established Srebrenica story in fact does rest on impressively objective foundations, we shall not insist on it in order not to ruffle any tribal feathers.

Instead of “disputing” or “denying”, we choose to mark this year’s anniversary by affirming. The atrocious destruction of the Serbian community in Srebrenica between 1992 and July of 1995 has scarcely ever been noted or acknowledged by the Srebrenica moralists de jour, so we will briefly perform their neglected task.

According the Bosnia-Herzegovina census of 1991, on the eve of the war, a quarter of Srebrenica’s population, or 8,315, were Serbs. When Serbian forces retook Srebrenica in July 1995, not a single one was left. A thousand, or more according to some estimates, were murdered, their villages attacked and razed to the ground; the remainder were expelled to Serbian-controlled territory surrounding the enclave.

The remains of Serbian villages attacked from inside the Srebrenica enclave

The beastly methodology used by armed gangs from the enclave to intimidate and expel their Serbian neighbours is depicted in the fate of little Mirjana, a Serbian girl raped and murdered by soon to be, in 1995, Srebrenica genocide victims, mourned by much of the free world.

Question: Did Serbs expelled by their neighbours have the right in 1995 to return to their homes and at least bury their dead?

Few would venture to say “no” to a question so starkly put. So sweeping the appalling pogrom of the unmourned Serbian community of Srebrenica under the rug, to avoid provoking such an embarrassing question, makes perfect, albeit somewhat twisted, sense.

The jury is now in on former Hague prosecutor Geoffrey Nice’s London travesty earlier this month, audaciously misnamed the “Uyghur Tribunal.” For those mindful of the spirit and practice of the Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) who were following the June 4 – 7 2021 proceedings of this so-called Tribunal which was staged in London, most of what was seen and heard there was eerily familiar.

The thrust in both instances can be summarised in terms of the pinning on the designated target the charge of “genocide” and the application of ICTY’s nebulous concept of Joint Criminal Enterprise as the overarching mode of its criminal liability. The allegation of genocide was made explicitly by practically all “expert witnesses” brought so far to give evidence before the Uyghur Tribunal and the alleged data they presented tended uniformly to support such an inference. During this session, the JCE liability concept was strongly suggested rather than explicitly advanced. That may, of course, change between now and the Second session scheduled to take place in September. It should be borne in mind that, though extremely unfavourable to the party to which it is applied, genocide is by now an overused and mainly propagandistic device with little legal substance left to it, resorted to largely to discredit and make seem abhorrent the targeted party. Joint Criminal Enterprise, on the other hand, is a more serious matter because it purports to explain the mechanism and assign specific responsibility for genocide and other heinous offences imputed to the target. It is therefore important to stress that in the present phase of the London proceedings a foundation is being laid for asserting at some point later that a JCE, involving the highest officials of the Chinese Government in executive positions, is what best accounts for the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law that are alleged to be taking place in Xinjiang at their behest.

That is plain when considering two characteristics of these proceedings. First, “fact” witnesses who claim to have seen or suffered numerous forms of grave abuses coincide in the common narrative that these alleged violations of international law, potentially amounting even to genocide, are widely dispersed throughout the province of Xinjiang. Evidently well coached in the law of genocide, they are careful to stress that targeting is being conducted of Turkic Muslim inhabitants not as individuals, but as a group. Second, the evidence of “expert witnesses” does not just echo these allegations but goes a step further, to offer an interpretation of why and how these outrages could have occurred. The point of convergence of all “expert” interpretations is that such widespread occurrence of identical phenomena throughout Xinjiang could not have occurred without the involvement of the coordinating hand of the central government in Beijing. The language that almost all “expert witnesses” use is that these phenomena are “neither isolated nor sporadic” (direct quote from the evidence of purported expert Sean Roberts), clearly implying that they are orchestrated from a superior centre. Thus, the stage is being set, when the political moment is judged to be opportune, to flesh out this particular mode of criminal liability for the crime of genocide and a long list of other grave alleged offences by simply inserting the names of specific Chinese political officials at the national level.

It may be noted, based on a careful listening to Geoffrey Nice’s introductory remarks for the opening session on 4 June, that a discrete reformulation, or at least amplification for public purposes, of the “Tribunal’s” agenda may have taken place.

Nice pointed out that “the Tribunal follows but is entirely separate from the China Tribunal that investigated forced organ harvesting.” While focusing on alleged mistreatment of Falun Gong practitioners, Nice said, that Tribunal also “heard some evidence” of persecution of the Uyghur ethnic minority, linking the two events (at 9:02-9:03 minutes).

Further on in his introductory remarks, Nice made reference to what he termed some historical precedents for a “people’s tribunal,” of the sort that he is heading. (In wartime Germany, that institution was known as the Volksgerichtshof, and it was presided by the notorious Nazi judge, Dr. Roland Freisler.) Nice cited as a precedent the Women’s Tribunal which considered allegations of sexual abuse committed by Japanese Imperial forces during World War II. He pointedly noted in his remarks that in its “judgment” in 2002 the Women’s tribunal found that criminal culpability was attributable to Japan’s head of state, the then “long dead Emperor” (4 June video record, at 9:06 minutes). The allusion to that emperor’s very much living analogue, in the country currently being targeted by Nice’s operation, is quite transparent and not at all difficult to decipher.

Finally, Nice drops a huge hint that in light of the evidence presented to the Uyghur Tribunal questions may arise “whether the definition of genocide may have to be expanded” (4 June at 9:27 minutes). Immediately following, he introduces a reassuring caveat, that in rendering its judgment in December the Tribunal will “confine itself to factual conclusions based on the law as it is, when satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt only on the basis of the evidence received” (4 June at 9:28 minutes). However, notwithstanding the prudent backpedalling, it would be a serious error to disregard the possibility that the thought of even further expanding and diluting the Genocide convention, to enable the inclusion within its purview of all manner of offences not originally contemplated, has occurred to those for whom Nice is fronting. Such a reframing of the legal concept of genocide would conveniently make it possible to target and tarnish a much broader range of uncooperative states, institutions, and individuals. It would correspond to the ominous tendency that Prof. George Szamuely has aptly termed “defining genocide down.”

In sum, already in his opening remarks Nice alluded to what may have been some discretely guarded features of what all along might have been the Uyghur Tribunal’s actual agenda. By linking that Tribunal’s formation and activity to the previous “China Tribunal” of a few years back, he confirms the coordinated role of both in a continuous effort to put political pressure on China. By highlighting that aspect of the Women’s sexual abuse tribunal judgment which imputes criminal liability far beyond direct perpetrators, all the way up to the head of state, he clears the way for taking a similar approach in the current proceedings as well. Finally, by raising even the possibility (though at this point carefully confined to the hypothetical level) that the legal definition of genocide might have to be expanded (presumably in response to the projected findings of this “tribunal”) he hints at his sponsors’ desire to turn the Genocide convention into an even more broad-ranging and efficient tool for prosecutorial targeting of non-conformist individuals and entities.

These flawed proceedings, as broadcast by the Uyghur Tribunal itself in direct transmission, essentially vindicate our previously expounded anticipations of their likely course. Many will be dismayed by Geoffrey Nice’s own statement on the first day that “the Tribunal has no rules of procedure and will operate by free evaluation of evidence, unrestricted by technical rules on admissibility” (4 June at 9:17 minutes). That admission, that the panel has not been furnished with any normative precepts to assist it in sorting out what passes as evidence that is put before it, appears at first glance incompatible with Nice’s commitment, expressed earlier on, that the “evidence [is] to be tested and assessed” (4 June at 9:10 minutes). In accordance with what criteria is the testing and assessment of evidence to take place?

The prospects raised by such a freewheeling approach are rendered even more disturbing by Chairman Nice’s description of the role of “witnesses of fact giving evidence of things they had seen and sometimes told to them by others” (4 June at 9:18 minutes). This readiness to admit what in the Western legal tradition is impermissible hearsay evidence (which in the witness statements published on the Uyghur Tribunal’s website often takes on multiple forms) vitiates fact testimony wherever it appears. That sort of witness evidence, however, is a standard feature in the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Nice was a prominent prosecutor and where presumably he perfected his trade.

The Uyghur Tribunal conducts its business in disregard of numerous precepts of legal procedure considered fundamental in the Western legal tradition. To illustrate its flawed character, it is sufficient to highlight just two.

First, the principle of cross-examination of witnesses to test the veracity of their evidence, detect and point out inconsistencies and possible bias, and where warranted to impeach them, is completely absent and disregarded in the proceedings of the Uyghur Tribunal. The role of cross-examination in a properly conducted trial was cannot be overemphasised. It was stressed long ago by the distinguished American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes when he called cross-examination the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

While there is a “counsel” (Hamid Sabi) who plays a quasi-prosecutorial role by prompting witnesses, there is no officer of comparable rank and stature to put to them probing questions once they are finished giving their evidence. Panel members are allowed to ask questions; however, these questions amount to requests to the witness to clarify and enlarge upon his or her testimony and thus do not serve to critically probe but merely to enhance the witness’ evidence.

As a result, the “evidence” remains totally uncontested and in such form could not pass muster in any British, common law, or even Continental law court.

The second major flaw is the failure of Tribunal organisers, once they understood that at this stage at least China would not be taking part, to institutionalise in some form the protection of China’s interests in the proceedings. They could have done that by appointing an amicus curiae or a qualified barrister to adversarially represent the accused party in order to at least mimic the appearance of fairness. For incomprehensible reasons, unless one should explain it by arrogance and the secure expectation that the entire operation is under such tight political and media control that they did not need to bother with trifles, they have chosen not to do that. Even the Hague Tribunal is careful to observe that formality whenever the need arises to give its proceedings a veneer of regularity.

Nefarious practices of the Hague Tribunal in fact pervade the proceedings of its Uyghur counterpart.

Notable among these uncreative replications is the use of prima facie unrealistic and obviously exaggerated figures. One such example is the claim that “up to a million Uyghurs” in Xinjiang are missing. No factual basis for such a figure is provided, just as no forensic basis is given for the claim that 8,000 prisoners were executed in Srebrenica. And there is another clever detail that is common to both narratives. The dubious figures are preceded by the easily overlooked caveat, “up to.” Up to a million can be anything between just one and a million victims. Estimates given in this deliberately vague form are psychologically effective but substantively meaningless. They conveniently preserve deniability in the event that accurate figures are at some later point discovered and must be explained away.

Another standard ICTY device used also by Uyghur Tribunal witnesses is the Srebrenica narrative meme of “men and boys.” The insertion of “boys” is designed to tug at the audience’s heartstrings and to enhance the abhorrence of the imputed crime. In the Srebrenica narrative the usual age range of the “men and boys” victim group is between 16 and 40. In the London proceedings, exactly the same Uyghur victim age range has been alleged by various “fact witnesses”, with some even putting the lower limit at 12 years of age. (Evidently aware of the inherent absurdity of incarcerating virtual children, a witness suggested that the Chinese authorities’ motive was that the young man was found to have had a prohibited application in his telephone.)

Rape is also a commonly cited allegation that links both narratives. In both instances the alleged incidence of rape is accompanied by mind-boggling numbers. In Bosnia, initial reports advertised figures of “up to 50,000,” only to be later whittled down to about 2,000, encompassing victims from all ethnic groups, once serious and independent inquiries had been conducted. Uyghur Tribunal witnesses alleged hundreds of thousands of rapes (as well as forced sterilisations). The authenticity of these figures could have been tested by effective cross-examination, of which there was none. One witness, Qelbinur Sidik, alleged that in the female concentration camp where she was teaching detainees her professional subject, Mandarin Chinese, which must have been useless to the detainees, she estimated the presence of 8,000 to 10,000 women prisoners. All the women were according to her raped by the guards on a nightly basis and consequently were unable to sit up straight in her class. Again, this is another instance where one sorely misses cross-examination as the proverbial legal engine that could have assisted us to sort out the truth of this highly improbable tale. (Whether the Chinese guards were permanently high on Viagra is obviously one of the first questions that a competent trial attorney would have put to her.)

ICTY’s generally sloppy use of unverified exhibits was made even sloppier in the Uyghur Tribunal proceedings. At ICTY, documents, pictures and other exhibits are introduced by the prosecutor for acceptance by the chamber through a particular witness who may have had some connection to them. At the London proceedings, it appears that the witness is permitted to bring exhibits he or she deems supportive of the evidence and that these items are then submitted to the panel without any particular examination of their provenance or relevance, a practice that is unacceptable in a regular courtroom situation. (As we learned from Chairman Nice, in his “tribunal” that is not a problem because it has no rules of procedure that might govern the handling of such matters.) Uyghur Tribunal witnesses could be seen bringing in “exhibits” that they themselves could not possibly have acquired, such as purported aerial photographs of concentration camps where Uyghur detainees were allegedly held and tortured. Such visual evidence, even if authentic, could only have been prepared and given to them by intelligence agencies.

What is the basic lesson to be learned from this appalling travesty of any semblance of legal process? In order to sound a thousand alarms, one need not be too concerned about the Chinese; they are big boys with nuclear toys and presumably can fend for themselves. From a global standpoint, it is supremely concerning that there lurks behind this a deliberate effort not just to lower standards in international justice, be they formal or informal. With the bogus ad hoc tribunals that had been set up over the last several decades that was successfully accomplished and these standards have already been dragged into the gutter.

The danger is that with the repetition of each such charade people will become progressively more accustomed to deviations from accepted practice, and it does not matter whether the offending body is a government court or an informal citizens’ inquiry. The same general rules for establishing the truth should apply to both. It is to be feared that corrupt practices such as have already characterised the Uyghur Tribunal are meant to gradually seep into the procedures of what legitimate courts still remain. Such a development would be to the grave detriment of what over the centuries has evolved in the West into a legal process designed to establish truth and secure justice. We can plainly see that Nice has used many of the tricks he learned at ICTY, except that this time round he has done it in a way that degrades the legal process even further.

Last but not least, China’s participation in the next phase would enable it to at least prepare and submit to world public opinion a Final Brief summarising its view of the proceedings, demanding that it be attached to the “tribunal’s” judgment scheduled to be announced in December of this year. That would deprive “tribunal” organisers of the coveted prize of a one-sided, unchallenged litany of fabrications (see here and here) being misrepresented to the largely unsuspecting public as the legitimate fruit of an honestly conducted citizens’ inquiry.

Such a triumph must not be conceded to Geoffrey Nice and his sinister directors.

Ugly truths which some had preferred be kept in the dark have been pulled into the light of day as a mass grave of 215 children was discovered this month in Kamloops BC using ground penetrating radar.

The controversial find has sent shockwaves through the world Community and resulted in official calls by UN human rights experts that investigations be undertaken by both the UN and Holy See into these and other atrocities committed by the Canadian government whose Catholic Church-controlled Federal Residential School processed 150 000 First Nations children in 130 schools between 1831-1970.

Many of these children were heartlessly ripped from their homes and prevented from either speaking their native languages, seeing their families or practicing their customs as part of a multi-generational assimilation program to break the “culture of the savages” as outlined in explicit detail by Canada’s founding father and arch racist John A. Macdonald.

The UN human rights experts called on June 4 for the full implementation of all recommendations of the 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which released a 2015 final report covering the cultural genocide committed on Canada’s First Nations’ by the Federal Government and Catholic Church. During the commissions seven-year study, it was revealed that there were 3200 confirmed child fatalities (yet no records existent of causes of deaths) while former TRC Chair Murray Sinclair has concluded that the real number was closer to 6000. Among their extensive interviews with First Nations communities, the Commission found tens of thousands of reports of torture, sexual violence and other criminal abuse committed by overseers of the residential school system.

This is obviously embarrassing for a nation which has grown accustomed to “enlightened” virtue signaling often being the first to condemn alleged cases of government-sanctioned genocide and human rights abuses against nations like Libya, Syria and most recently China. The consequences of Canada’s liberal self-righteous condemnation of other nations’ bad behavior to their minority groups has resulted in Canada’s support for acts of war such as sanctions, spreading misinformation which often ignores the role of western intelligence agencies at the heart of many of the operations- especially across Africa and the Middle East- and has even led to the outright bombing of nations back to the stone age with the full backing of liberal imperialists among Canada’s power structure.

When such paragons of liberal enlightenment like Prime Minister Trudeau cry crocodile tears over the abuses committed against the First Nations over the decades- and the current mass grave situation is no exception- it is often undertaken with a fair dose of misdirection and fallacy. For instance, the language heard by virtue signalling politicians implies that these injustices are a thing of the past and the new “normal” involves a hypersensitivity and respect for First Nations.

However, evidence shows a very different story, as First Nation families continue to be ripped apart with over 52% of Canadian children in foster care being indigenous and with suicide rates among natives 3x higher than the national average.

Across Canada’s reserves, states of government-enforced stagnation and isolation have been maintained for the past 50 years which has deprived these minority groups of any genuine economic development under a modern “human flagpole” policy. This social engineering program dubbed officially the “Arctic Re-Allocation Project” was innovated between 1952-1958 and saw hundreds of First Nations family sent back to “their natural ecosystems” in the Arctic despite the fact that they had assimilated into the industrial economic paradigm for several generations and had forgotten many of their hunting-gathering skills resulting in many deaths. This program was more broadly adopted when the assimilation regime was ended in the 1970s and a new manipulative policy befitting a post-industrial paradigm was imposed which I described in a recent article on Eco Colonialism.

To this day, 61 native communities have no access to clean water and no federal regulatory protection on infrastructure.

A Human Rights Watch representative commenting: “If you are anywhere else in Canada and you turn on the tap, then you are protected by safe drinking water regulations. If you live on reserve, no such regulations exist. There are no safe drinking water protections.”

Indigenous communities find themselves often adrift with no sense of future and no economic opportunities suffering 3 times more infant mortalities than the national average, 11% of all opioid deaths (despite only accounting for 2.6% of the population), and 47% of native children living in poverty. Inuit communities suffer the worst statistics with 11 times more suicides than the national average. Up until last year, BC hospitals still maintained a “birth alert” registry to keep tabs on all native families that might be a risk to their children.

While it is nice that a $33 million registry was approved to track down other cases of abuse- much of which will be directed to families directly impacted by the Kamloops abuses, the federal government is showing its true colors by battling thousands of First Nations victims in court who are defending the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals ruling that each of the 50 000 victims are entitled to $40 000 compensation each who had been taken from their homes and did not receive welfare protection.

The facts show that the injustices of the past have not disappeared, but merely changed forms over the past decades and continue to distort and traumatize in lesser understood modes through the present day. Will the ultimate truth and justice be revealed through the UN or Vatican’s participation in a serious inquiry into the past and present crimes of the Canadian government or will blind eyes continue to be turned as past skeletons are kept in their unmarked graves?

The author can be reached at canadianpatriot1776@tutanota.com

The recent discovery of an indigenous mass grave in Canada bearing the remains of 215 children, is yet another reminder of colonial impunity. Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest of many schools in Canada run by the government and the Catholic Church, which participated in the practice of separating indigenous children from their communities and families, in a bid to assimilate the younger generations to the settler-mainstream society. Over 150,000 Indigenous children were forced into these schools; over 4,100 have been reported dead or missing. From malnutrition, medical neglect, to sexual abuse, the crimes were covered up.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has come under criticism from indigenous leaders for failing to move beyond symbolic language of reconciliation. While the government pointed towards the Truth and Reconciliation report, Trudeau implied that the lengthy research process was partly due to the various partnerships and collaborations involved. “If it were only done by ministers, if it were only done by Ottawa, to solve these challenges, it might have been done long ago, but it would have been done wrong,” he stated.

A thriving colonial political supremacy should have been blamed for the stalling, as well as the Canadian government’s reliance on symbolic gestures as opposed to committed action to locate the missing indigenous children. To merely state, in the wake of the mass grave discovery, “We have committed as a government to be there for reconciliation, but also to be there for truth and that is an important step. So yes, we will be there to work with communities on the things they need and on the things we all need to know,” is not indicative of a government’s resolve to aid the process of Canada’s indigenous collective memory, let alone establish culpability and accountability for the historical atrocities.

Between 2007 and 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission embarked upon a mission to gather testimonies and accounts pertaining to the Residential Schools which targeted indigenous children. In the span of six years, the commission gathered historical accounts from over 6,500 witnesses, while the Canadian government presented over 5 million records to the Commission. In December 2015, the Commission presented its report, along with recommendations for the government to embark upon the reconciliation process. Prominent among the recommendations was the importance of “constructive actions on addressing the ongoing legacies of colonialism.”

Yet Trudeau’s rhetoric indicated no reference to the colonial cultural genocide which established control over indigenous lands and peoples. The justification for the residential schools targeting indigenous children was rooted in white supremacy. As Canada’s first Prime Minister John A Macdonald in 1883 declared, the policy was that children should be removed from their parents and “the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

Canada’s recent discovery not only alludes to the existence of other mass graves in the country. Additionally, it also sheds light on the global colonial legacy and how the military empire expanded through settler-colonialism and exploitation of indigenous lands – the latter hindered by the presence of the indigenous.

While the UN Human Rights Office has called for an investigation into the deaths of indigenous children in Canada, it has avoided mentioning the ramifications of colonialism. “Lack of exhaustive clarification and access to truth and redress for what happened during this dark period compounds this,” UN spokeswoman Marta Hurtado stated. At an international level, the organisation purportedly responsible for protecting human rights is still deeply entrenched in safeguarding the historical colonial legacies, hence the refusal to politicise human rights, lest the struggle for collective memory, which is common to all indigenous peoples, dent the structure which has served the colonial powers so well until now.

Alan MACLEOD

Australia’s 18 million Facebook users woke up yesterday to find that, without warning, local and global news sites were unavailable, meaning that they could not view or share news at all. Facebook users across the world were also unable to read or access any Australian news publications. The tech giant had taken the step of essentially shutting down its site and “unfriending” an entire nation in response to the government’s proposals to tax them.

Lawmakers in Canberra had drawn up plans to “level the playing field” between social media giants and the traditional press. In practice, this would mean Facebook and Google handing over a sizable chunk of their advertising profits to the government to subsidize struggling news outlets, on whom they depend for content.

In choosing the nuclear option, Facebook appears to have hoped to trigger a public outcry that would force the government into a U-turn. However, it seems to have miscalculated, as the action drew widespread condemnation, even from human rights groups. Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch’s Australia Director condemned the company for “severely restricting the flow of information to Australians,” not just for news, but also information on government health and emergency services. “This is an alarming and dangerous turn of events,” she concluded.

“It is extremely concerning that a private company is willing to control access to information that people rely on. Facebook’s action starkly demonstrates why allowing one company to exert such dominant power over our information ecosystem threatens human rights,” said Tim O’Connor of Amnesty International Australia. “Facebook’s willingness to block credible news sources also stands in sharp distinction to the company’s poor track record in addressing the spread of hateful content and disinformation on the platform,” he added.

Myanmar: digital accessory to a genocide

One particularly shocking example of Facebook’s complicity in spreading hate is in Myanmar, where thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been killed and more than 700,000 have fled to neighboring countries.

A United Nations human rights investigation found that the platform, which is virtually ubiquitous in Myanmar, had been used to spread fake news about Muslim atrocities in order to spark a genocide. “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended,” said UN investigator Yanghee Lee.

Facebook admitted that played a role in the violence. However, it resisted calls for it to suspend its service inside the country. “Facebook does a good deal of good — connecting people with friends and family, helping small businesses, surfacing informative content. If we turn it off we lose all of that,” said a company executive.

Facebook when its platform is a driving force for genocide vs Facebook when it faces possible regulation pic.twitter.com/XrA8uHzuDY

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) February 17, 2021

In 2018, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said that he felt “fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world.” This discomfort apparently disappeared when the company’s bottom line was threatened with regulation.

A media behemoth

Facebook can certainly afford to pay a levy to help journalism. The Silicon Valley giant recently announced it had taken in over $84 billion in advertising revenue in 2020 (a 21% increase from 2019) and posted a spectacular total post-tax profit of $29 billion. 71% of Australians use the company’s services, making it by far the most widely used social media platform in the country, ahead of YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp respectively.

Unlike traditional media, Facebook and Google do not produce any reporting of their own, nor do they employ any journalists. Together, the two companies bear significant responsibility for the decline of journalism across the developed world, as advertisers have ditched the traditional press in favor of targeted advertising offered online. Together, the two companies account for over three-quarters of all online advertising revenue in Australia. Facebook’s marketplace has also largely made small advertising — a key source of income for print media — obsolete. From a high of over $49 billion in 2006, advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers has decreased by over two-thirds, with a corresponding drop in the number of journalists employed. It is clear that, if old media is to be saved, something must be done. Whether this is the solution is up for debate.

Behind closed doors, Google has already signed a number of deals with Australian outlets, promising to cut them in on their advertising revenue. Facebook, however, has chosen to up the ante, participating in a direct standoff against the Australian government. Other nations, such as Canada, are already promising to give the social media giants the Australia treatment, meaning that the outcome of the conflict will likely have global repercussions for the future of the press and of social media.

Perhaps this explains why Facebook was comparatively uninterested in shutting itself down to stop a genocide in Myanmar but chose the nuclear option when it came to government regulation of its business model.

mintpressnews.com

John PILGER

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open.

At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.

I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties.

I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.”

Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukemia.

“No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin” said a New York Times headline on September 13, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. “General Farrell,” reported William H. Lawrence, “denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”

Only one reporter, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, had braved the perilous journey to Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing, in defiance of the Allied occupation authorities, which controlled the “press pack”.

“I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the London Daily Express of September 5,1945. Sitting in the rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter, he described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”.

For this, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared. His witness to the truth was never forgiven.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of America’s war propaganda in the 21st century, casting a new enemy, and target – China.

During the 75 years since Hiroshima, the most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and to save lives.

“Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [against Japan] and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

The National Archives in Washington contains documented Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the U.S. made clear the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Nothing was done.

The U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the U.S. Air Force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. Stimson later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the [atomic] bomb”.

Stimson’s foreign policy colleagues — looking ahead to the post-war era they were then shaping “in our image”, as Cold War planner George Kennan famously put it — made clear they were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the [atomic] bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the atomic bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Harry Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

The “experiment” continued long after the war was over. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific: the equivalent of more than one Hiroshima every day for 12 years.

The human and environmental consequences were catastrophic. During the filming of my documentary, The Coming War on China, I chartered a small aircraft and flew to Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It was here that the United States exploded the world’s first Hydrogen Bomb. It remains poisoned earth. My shoes registered “unsafe” on my Geiger counter. Palm trees stood in unworldly formations. There were no birds.

I trekked through the jungle to the concrete bunker where, at 6.45 on the morning of March 1, 1954, the button was pushed. The sun, which had risen, rose again and vaporised an entire island in the lagoon, leaving a vast black hole, which from the air is a menacing spectacle: a deathly void in a place of beauty.

The radioactive fall-out spread quickly and “unexpectedly”. The official history claims “the wind changed suddenly”. It was the first of many lies, as declassified documents and the victims’ testimony reveal.

Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, “They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated… The United States needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do.”

Like Hiroshima, the secret of the Marshall Islands was a calculated experiment on the lives of large numbers of people. This was Project 4.1, which began as a scientific study of mice and became an experiment on “human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon”.

The Marshall Islanders I met in 2015 — like the survivors of Hiroshima I interviewed in the 1960s and 70s — suffered from a range of cancers, commonly thyroid cancer; thousands had already died. Miscarriages and stillbirths were common; those babies who lived were often deformed horribly.

Unlike Bikini, nearby Rongelap atoll had not been evacuated during the H-Bomb test. Directly downwind of Bikini, Rongelap’s skies darkened and it rained what first appeared to be snowflakes. Food and water were contaminated; and the population fell victim to cancers. That is still true today.

I met Nerje Joseph, who showed me a photograph of herself as a child on Rongelap. She had terrible facial burns and much of her was hair missing. “We were bathing at the well on the day the bomb exploded,” she said. “White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out.”

Lemoyo Abon said, “Some of us were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world.”

U.S. official archive film I included in my film refers to the islanders as “amenable savages”. In the wake of the explosion, a U.S. Atomic Energy Agency official is seen boasting that Rongelap “is by far the most contaminated place on earth”, adding, “it will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”

American scientists, including medical doctors, built distinguished careers studying the “human uptake”. There they are in flickering film, in their white coats, attentive with their clipboards. When an islander died in his teens, his family received a sympathy card from the scientist who studied him.

This struck me forcibly when I filmed at Taranaki Ground Zero at Maralinga in the Australian desert. In a dish-like crater was an obelisk on which was inscribed: “A British atomic weapon was test exploded here on 9 October 1957”. On the rim of the crater was this sign:

WARNING: RADIATION HAZARD

Radiation levels for a few hundred metres

around this point may be above those considered

safe for permanent occupation.

For as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the ground was irradiated. Raw plutonium lay about, scattered like talcum powder: plutonium is so dangerous to humans that a third of a milligram gives a 50 percent chance of cancer.

The only people who might have seen the sign were Indigenous Australians, for whom there was no warning. According to an official account, if they were lucky “they were shooed off like rabbits”.

The Enduring Menace

Today, an unprecedented campaign of propaganda is shooing us all off like rabbits. We are not meant to question the daily torrent of anti-Chinese rhetoric, which is rapidly overtaking the torrent of anti-Russia rhetoric. Anything Chinese is bad, anathema, a threat: Wuhan …. Huawei. How confusing it is when “our” most reviled leader says so.

The current phase of this campaign began not with Trump but with Barack Obama, who in 2011 flew to Australia to declare the greatest build-up of U.S. naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since World War Two. Suddenly, China was a “threat”. This was nonsense, of course. What was threatened was America’s unchallenged psychopathic view of itself as the richest, the most successful, the most “indispensable” nation.

What was never in dispute was its prowess as a bully — with more than 30 members of the United Nations suffering American sanctions of some kind and a trail of the blood running through defenceless countries bombed, their governments overthrown, their elections interfered with, their resources plundered.

Obama’s declaration became known as the “pivot to Asia”. One of its principal advocates was his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who, as WikiLeaks revealed, wanted to rename the Pacific Ocean “the American Sea”.

Whereas Clinton never concealed her warmongering, Obama was a maestro of marketing. “I state clearly and with conviction,” said the new president in 2009, “that America’s commitment is to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Obama increased spending on nuclear warheads faster than any president since the end of the Cold War. A “usable” nuclear weapon was developed. Known as the B61 Model 12, it means, according to General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable”.

The target is China. Today, more than 400 American military bases almost encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to South-East Asia, Japan and Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, as one U.S. strategist told me, “the perfect noose”.

The Unthinkable

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the infamous catch cry of its chief Cold War strategist, Herman Kahn – “thinking the unthinkable”. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war.

Kahn’s apocalyptic view is shared by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical fanatic who believes in the “rapture of the End”. He is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. “I was CIA director,” he boasted, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.” Pompeo’s obsession is China.

The endgame of Pompeo’s extremism is rarely if ever discussed in the Anglo-American media, where the myths and fabrications about China are standard fare, as were the lies about Iraq. A virulent racism is the sub-text of this propaganda. Classified “yellow” even though they were white, the Chinese are the only ethnic group to have been banned by an “exclusion act” from entering the United States, because they were Chinese. Popular culture declared them sinister, untrustworthy, “sneaky”, depraved, diseased, immoral.

An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, was devoted to promoting fear of the “yellow peril” as if all of Asia was about to fall down on the whites-only colony by the force of gravity.

‘The Chinese Octopus’, The Bulletin, Sydney 1886, an early promoter of the “Yellow Peril” and other stereotypes.

As the historian Martin Powers writes, acknowledging China’s modernism, its secular morality and “contributions to liberal thought threatened European face, so it became necessary to suppress China’s role in the Enlightenment debate …. For centuries, China’s threat to the myth of Western superiority has made it an easy target for race-baiting.”

In the Sydney Morning Herald, tireless China-basher Peter Hartcher described those who spread Chinese influence in Australia as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows”. Hartcher, who favourably quotes the American demagogue Steve Bannon, likes to interpret the “dreams” of the current Chinese elite, to which he is apparently privy. These are inspired by yearnings for the “Mandate of Heaven” of 2,000 years ago. Ad nausea.

To combat this “mandate”, the Australian government of Scott Morrison has committed one of the most secure countries on earth, whose major trading partner is China, to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American missiles that can be fired at China.

The trickledown is already evident. In a country historically scarred by violent racism towards Asians, Australians of Chinese descent have formed a vigilante group to protect delivery riders. Phone videos show a delivery rider punched in the face and a Chinese couple racially abused in a supermarket. Between April and June, there were almost 400 racist attacks on Asian-Australians.

“We are not your enemy,” a high-ranking strategist in China told me, “but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s arsenal is small compared with America’s, but it is growing fast, especially the development of maritime missiles designed to destroy fleets of ships.

“For the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy…”

In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who wrote that a “blinding attack on China” was planned, “with strikes that could be mistakenly perceived [by the Chinese] as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2019, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War, much of it in high secrecy. An armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is fear of such a blockade that has seen China develop its Belt and Road Initiative along the old Silk Road to Europe and urgently build strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands.

In Shanghai, I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and novelist, typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! Having grown up in the chaotic, brutal Cultural Revolution, she has travelled and lived in the U.S. and Europe. “Many Americans imagine,” she said, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them… They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it’s 600 million.”

Modern China’s epic achievements, its defeat of mass poverty, and the pride and contentment of its people (measured forensically by American pollsters such as Pew) are wilfully unknown or misunderstood in the West. This alone is a commentary on the lamentable state of Western journalism and the abandonment of honest reporting.

China’s repressive dark side and what we like to call its “authoritarianism” are the facade we are allowed to see almost exclusively. It is as if we are fed unending tales of the evil super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu. And it is time we asked why: before it is too late to stop the next Hiroshima.

consortiumnews.com

In addition of mass executions, Bouhdiba found that the Khmer Rouge also committed genocide through famine and disease. The latter included dysentery, cholera, and typhus. That conclusion in light of Donald Trump’s criminal negligence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, which has witnessed the United States topping the world’s charts in infections and deaths, evokes the Khmer Rouge precedent in suggesting that Trump and his administration have been practicing autogenocide against the American people.

Over the last century-and-a-half years, autogenocide from governments permitting the spread of deadly infectious diseases has been alleged by various human rights lawyers and historians. These include the actions of the Ottoman Turks against Armenian nationals of the empire from 1915 to 1916, of various Congolese armed factions against the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 1990s to the present, and by the Saudi-backed Yemeni puppet government against the people of Yemen.

But what of the 135,000 (and counting) deaths of Americans from Covid-19 caused principally by the criminal negligence of the Trump regime? When the statistics are perused, the victims of Trump’s genocide-by-inaction are principally ethnic minorities, an alarm bell that should be sounding in every international human rights office around the world.

The following is what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reported about the deaths from Covid-19 of non-white ethnic groups in the United States: “Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put some members of racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting COVID-19 or experiencing severe illness, regardless of age. Among some racial and ethnic minority groups, including Non-Hispanic black persons, Hispanics and Latinos, and American Indians/Alaska Natives, evidence points to higher rates of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 than among Non-Hispanic white persons. As of June 12, 2020, age-adjusted hospitalization rates are highest among Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native and Non-Hispanic black persons, followed by Hispanic or Latino persons.” This disparity can be traced to the Trump administration’s disregard for testing and tracing among ethnic minorities and failure to provide adequate medical assistance to hard-hit regions where non-white ethnic minorities are predominant, including inner cities, rural areas of the Deep South and Southwest, and Native American reservations. When Trump told a crowd of his racist supporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma that he ordered his administration “to slow the testing down,” it was the closest thing to an admission by Trump that he is only interested a causing mass deaths from Covid-19. Such previous acts by ruthless leaders and warlords have resulted in charges of autogenocide in Ottoman Turkey, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yemen. Trump gave his autogenocide policies a dry run in 2017 when he withheld needed relief aid to Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth territory, in the wake of the disastrous Hurricane Maria.

The CDC’s analysis shows that Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native persons have a rate approximately 5 times that of non-Hispanic white persons, non-Hispanic black persons have a rate approximately 5 times that of non-Hispanic white persons, and Hispanic or Latino persons have a rate approximately 4 times that of non-Hispanic white persons. That is a documented set of statistics that open the door for an investigation by U.S. and international human rights teams of a possible concerted effort by key individuals in the Trump administration, including Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, presidential senior advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar of adopting policies to bring about the highest number of deaths among non-white Americans by limiting, embargoing, restricting, or otherwise interfering with the delivery of medical assistance to regions of the United States where non-white Americans are concentrated.

A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that non-white Covid-19 deaths far exceed the averages in total death counts. In Alabama, African-Americans make up 27 percent of the population but account for 45 percent of all Covid deaths. In Mississippi, where African-Americans account for 38 percent of the overall population, they also account for an alarming 50 percent of all Covid deaths. In Georgia, blacks are 31 percent of the population and have suffered 47 percent of overall deaths. In Louisiana, the ratio is 32 percent to 53 percent of overall deaths. In South Carolina, it is 26 percent to 45 percent. In the District of Columbia, the capital city of the United States, where blacks comprise 45 percent of the population, they account for a staggering 74 percent of overall deaths. In Nebraska, Hispanics are 11 percent of the total population and account for 24 percent of overall deaths. In Arizona, where Native Americans account for 4 percent of the population, their overall death count is 16 percent.

Embargoing, restricting, or otherwise withholding virus testing kits, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other medical materiel from African-American neighborhoods, Hispanic barrios, Native American reservations, and other regions based on ethnicity, the preponderance of co-morbidities among the targeted population, and other discriminating factors could constitute the conducting of biological warfare by permitting Covid to rampantly spread to vulnerable groups. Trump also restricted the dissemination of important Covid data from federal agencies to state and local government public health departments. This policy was readopted by states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, which refused to share Covid data with county and municipal health authorities.

The involvement of Trump son-in-law Kushner in commandeering supplies of ventilators, PPE, and other supplies to individual states makes him a potential criminal co-conspirator, along with Trump, Pence, Miller, Azar, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and others, in conducting passive biological warfare. Targets of this passive warfare included African-Americans; Hispanic-Americans; Native Americans; elderly military veterans who were administered lethal and untested hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug; and nursing home residents of all ethnicities. In some cases, the White House targets were not ethnic, but political. Democratic Party states were victimized by medical supply embargoes with Republican states receiving more favorable treatment.

“New York” magazine charged the White House with carrying out a wartime operation against state governments. The magazine’s “Intelligencer” column on April 19 of this year wrote, “in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War — to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need.” Kushner announced at a White House press conference that the federal medical stockpile was not meant for use by the states, as if the states were not included in the “United States of America.”

In addition to embargoing the federal stockpile of medical supplies to the states, the Trump White House began ordering federal agents to begin confiscating ventilators, respirator masks, and other supplied from states, local governments, and private medical firms. This biological warfare-by-proxy targeted the States of Colorado and Michigan, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Los Angeles, Somerset County in New Jersey, and Kaiser Permanente.

The domestic embargoing of health care supplies, along with the hobbling of federal health agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization, all represent individual criminal charges in an indictment of the Trump administration for carrying out “autogenocide” against the American people. Trump is not the only leader carrying out Covid-related autogenocide against his own people. Ideally, Trump, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, members of their regimes, and a few other worthies should all be paraded before the International Criminal Court in The Hague to answer to criminal charges of autogenocide.