International Atrocity Day

Recognising man's inhumanity to man 
Suggestions are called for. When would be the best day to mourn the dead of the past few hundred years, people murdered for being the wrong race, the wrong religion, the wrong color, or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? We need to be reminded each year that Muslims are not the only people to commit atrocities. The so-called "patriarchs" Moses, Saul, Joshua, Jude, Gideon, David and Solomon, were all mass murderers. Alexander the so-called "Great" was nothing but a butcher who slaughtered untold innocent people just to prove what a big man he was. And Richard the so-called "Lion Heart" was just a savage brute who beheaded thousands of defenceless, surrendered civilians because he felt like it.
Saint Peter, alleged "rock" of the Catholic Church, was a thief and a murderer. Anyone who refused to surrender their wealth to his fledgling church was murdered, or as the New Testament so cutely puts it, they were forced to "give up their ghost".

We need to mourn:
The Caananites, Middianites and other gentiles murdered by Hebrew butchers who were obeying "god's" orders.
The early Christian martyrs murdered by Roman sadists.
The hundreds of thousands of witches and heretics across Europe tortured and murdered by the Catholic Church
The Jews murdered by the Catholic Church
The English murdered by the Roman Legions
The English murdered by the Danish Vikings
The Scots and Picts murdered by the English
The English and Welsh murdered by the Normans
The Jews and Muslims slaughtered by the Crusaders
The civilians beheaded by Richard Coer de Lion at Acre
The Cathars murdered by the Vatican for being Gnostic Christians
The genocide of millions by Ghengis Khan and his descendants
The Irish murdered by Oliver Cromwell and his landlords
The Aztecs and Mayans exterminated by the Conquistadors
The Protestants murdered in their beds during the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre
The millions of Africans captured, enslaved, worked to death or otherwise murdered by six christian nations during the glory days of slavery and colonisation.
The Russians murdered by Ivan the Terrible
The French guillotined by the French during and after the Revolution
The indigenous natives slaughtered by the early American and Canadian settlers
The Zulus slaughtered by the British
The population of what became Rhodesia slaughtered by the British
The Kenyan civilians slaughtered by the British to punish the Mau Mau
The Indians slaughtered by the British
The Aborigines slaughtered by the early Australian settlers
The Maoris slaughtered by the early New Zealand settlers
The million Irish starved to death by the English
The Algerians murdered by the French
The Moroccans murdered by the French
The Vietnamese murdered by the French
The New Guineans murdered by the Dutch
The West Africans murdered by the Portugese
The millions of Congo rubber workers mutilated and/or murdered by King Leopold and his Belgium butchers
The thousands of Filipinos murdered by the USA for resisting invasion.
The Negroes hanged by the Ku Klux Klan
The passengers aboard the Lusitania drowned by Germany
The partisans shot and blown to bits during the Spanish Civil War by General Franco and the Nazis
The millions of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals shot, starved and gassed to death by the Nazis
The Ethiopeans murdered by Mussolini
The countless millions of Chinese murdered by Mao Ze Tong
The countless millions of Russians murdered by Stalin
The Chinese murdered by the Japanese
The Koreans murdered by the Japanese
The Filipinos murdered by the Japanese
The rest of Asia murdered by the Japanese
The Serbs beheaded by Croations for not converting to Catholicism
The 91 'King David Hotel' guests murderd by Zionists
The Hindus murdered by Muslims
The Muslims murdered by Hindus
The Papau New Guineans murdered by Indonesia
The genocide of Nubians by Germans poisoning their water
The genocide of more than one million Armenians by Ottoman Turks
The Egyptians murdered by the British over Suez
The thousands of Korean civilian refugees strafed and napalmed by American pilots and marines
The hundreds of thousands of Ugandans murdered by Idi Amin
The 60 South Africans murdered at Sharpsville by South African police
The Shiites and Sarais murdered by Sunnis
The African Muslim girls who die from septicemia after genital mutilation
The Irish and Australian children beaten to death in orphanages run by 'The Sisters of Mercy'
The Hungarians murdered by the Soviets
The Czechoslovakians murdered by the Soviets
The Romanians murdered by Ceaucescu
The Irish shot dead by the British Black and Tans on Bloody Sunday.
The 5,200 Mexicans murdered by their own government
The 80,000 Vietnamese civilians murdered by Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem
The 750,000 Cambodians murdered by Kissinger, Nixon and co
The 1,000,000 Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot
The thousands of civilians, especially children, murdered or maimed by Motorola landmines
The 128 Vietnamese peasants murdered by 'Charlie Company'
The 2,000 Lebanese refugees "indirectly" murdered by Ariel Sharon
The Munich Olympic Games contestants murdered by 'Black September'
The Irish shot and bombed by the Irish
The Korean airline passengers murdered by the Soviets
The Palestinians murdered by (USA funded) Israelis
The Israelis murdered by Palestinians
The Greek Cypriots murdered by Turkish Cypriots
The Turkish Cypriots murdered by Greek Cypriots
The Kurds murdered by Turkey
The Pakistani women scarred by acid and murdered by their husbands
The Jordanian women murdered by husbands and brothers in "honor killings"
The 910 Jonestown dwellers murdered by the Reverend Jim Jones
The tens of thousands of Argentinians murdered by Peron and the 'generals'
The 150,000 Guatamalians murdered by the (USA funded) junta
The 40,000 El Salvadorians murdered by the (USA funded) junta
The Honduras fruit pickers murdered by the (USA funded) junta
The Nicauragurans murdered by the (USA funded) Contras
The 30,000 Chilians murdered by the (USA funded and installed) Pinochet regime
The 30 Hebron worshipers machine gunned by Jewish hero, Goldstein
The 259 Pan Am passengers murdered over Lockerbie by Libya
The 64 Swiss tourists murdered at Luxor by Egyptians
The 2120 Panamanians murdered by George H. Bush (to catch one man)
The 200,000 East Timorese murdered by Indonesia
The Japanese commuters gassed with Sarin by 'Aum Supreme' cultists
The 230 American military personnel murdered by terrorists in Lebanon
The 2,000 Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein
The more than one million Iraqi children starved to death or denied medical treatment due to United Nations sanctions against Iraq
The African US embassy staff murdered in Kenya by Al Queda
The African US embassy staff murdered in Tanzania by Al Queda
The 168 Oklahoma office workers murdered by Timothy McVeigh
The 8,000 Bosnian men and boys slaughtered by Serbs at Srebrenica
The hundreds of thousands of Tutsis murdered by Catholic Hutus
The untold thousands of Afghannis murdered by the Taliban
The Chinese murdered by their own government in Tiananmen Square and afterwards
The 271 villagers slaughtered by Indonesian troops at Dili
The 35 Tasmanian tourists murdered by Martin Bryant
The 2,798 New Yorkers murdered on 9/11 by Saudi Arabians and Egyptians
The 196 Turks and visitors murdered by Al Queda in Istanbul
The 202 Australians and locals murdered in Bali by Islamists
The more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians "Shocked and Awed" to death by the USA on a hunch that there might be WMD hidden somewhere (figures – Lancet Magazine)
The thousands of Liberians murdered by Gadaffi mobs
The 191 Madrid train passengers blown up by Al Queda
The Iraqi prisoners tortured to death by American soldiers
The countless thousands of people murdered in the Sudan
The more than 400 Russians, half of them children, murdered by Chechen "freedom fighters" at Beslan.
The one-hundred plus villages massacred in the Congo on behalf of Australia's Anvil Mining Company.
The untold millions of murdered Rwandans
The fifty-eight Londoners blown to smithereens by British Islamists.

These are just a few of the atrocities which come to mind, there have been many, many more. Most of them were committed by nations who now feign "horror" at Muslim atrocities. I have not even mentioned the billions of people killed during 'legitimate' wars (if there is such a thing. I mean, how legitimate was it to drop flaming napalm on Korean and Vietnamese women and children?)
I have not included the Hundred Year War, the Twenty Year War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American War of Independence, the American Civil War, 1914-1918, Coventry, Plymouth, London, Pearl Harbour, Russia, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam (other than for the one act of supreme bastardry) because it could be argued that these atrocities were 'legitmate' wars.
I've concentrated on atrocities committed against the entirely innocent, in most cases, civilians going about their private business, tending their farms, their rice fields and their families, and who were murdered because it suited brutal (usually religious) men and powerful nations to eliminate them.

How about October 1st for International Atrocity Day? It might put that mini atrocity known as 9/11 into some kind of perspective.

"Hey man, did you hear what we did in Pinkville?" And I said, "No, what did you do in Pinkville?" I had been up there a couple of times, as a door gunner, and had been in engagements around the village. I said, "What'd you do in Pinkville?" He said, "Well, we went in there and lined up all these people and massacred 'em – massacred a whole village." 

Three and a half years house arrest for that particular atrocity.

The Original Axis of Evil

Original Axis of Evil
by Dag Herbjornsrud

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

 


Iraq, Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland: The root causes of the world's hottest conflicts lie in the break-up of Europe's colonial empires. But who dares admit it? Do you want to know the real scandal of the year 2005?
According to The Sun in England and the world press, the scandal occurred when Prince Harry (son of British Crown Prince Charles) in January showed up at a party in Wiltshire, wearing a German Nazi uniform.
The picture of the 20-year-old wearing a swastika armband and a Wehrmacht badge with a cigarette and drink in hand, shocked the world.
Rightfully, the prince's flirting with Adolf Hitler's killing of six million Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals was strongly condemned.
But here's the real conundrum: Do you know what Harry's older brother Prince William wore at the same party celebrating their friend's 22nd birthday with 250 guests in attendance?
The answer is "native African" dress. Prince William proudly wore a Zulu outfit with black tights and a leopard skin robe.
The reason? The theme of this upper class birthday party was "native and colonial". The English prince was celebrating his country's brutal colonial rule by dressing in the traditional clothes of one of its conquered peoples – the Zulus of South-Africa.
Not only did Prince William and the elite with their native-mocking costumes pay homage to the military atrocities of their ancestors, but so few in Europe today question the deaths of millions of Africans, Asians, and American Indians.
The real scandal is that nobody views this celebration of colonial brutality as a scandal!
But if one opposes Prince Harry's Nazi outfit, one should also question Prince William's colonial outfit. Hitler did, after all, have the British colonial empire as a main inspiration for his wars for more Lebensraum – living space.

Norwegians and Irish
The only media pundit I have seen questioning the royal party's events is columnist Simon Woolley. Commenting on the theme Native and Colonial, Woolley wrote:

"A more appalling theme would be difficult to find unless you were ignorant and/or arrogant. For black people around the world there was no frivolity within colonialism, only degradation and dehumanisation."

Exactly. But tell that to any average European, and what you get back is a blank stare. Citizens of former colonial empires are actually taught to be proud of their glorious colonial past. The present European celebration of the colonising of "the natives" seems to be caused less by pure arrogance than by pure ignorance. Or, as the motto is for the famous Where is Raed blog of the Iraqi Salam Pax, quoting Samuel Huntington:

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

If we don't know about the mistakes of the past, on all sides, we are doomed to repeat them. It's about time that Europeans also accept historic facts about their former occupation of the world. I have dedicated the latest decade of my life fighting Huntington's false Clash of Civilisations claims, but this one sentence at least has some truth in it.
Huntington only forgets that Europeans were also victims of colonial occupation. Just ask the Irish. Thousands of Catholics from Ireland were sent aboard slave ships to the Caribbean by the invading protestant Englishmen.
Ask Norway's two greatest authors – Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun – who were full of bitterness against the British empire because of its colonial actions in the 19th century.
In order to understand the present conflict in Northern Ireland – as in Iraq, Palestine, Rwanda, and Kashmir – we need to acknowledge the effects of the unjust European occupations.
Actions of the past have influenced our present world situation. Just as our present actions will influence our common future. Thus, in order to create justice in the future, we need to acknowledge the injustice of the past.

Axis of Evil
I am not bringing up this colonial theme to excuse the problems of the present. We should never point to former crimes in order to not improve our own societies.
Rather the opposite: Basic knowledge of the brutalities both of the Nazi regime and of the colonial regimes are necessary in order to prevent similar atrocities again.
The Axis of Evil has become a popular phrase. Well, here is the original Colonial Axis of Evil: The empires of Britain, France, and Belgium.
And here is how these former empires now treat the suppression of their past:
1. Regret in Belgium: In 1885, King Leopold II received Kongo as his private gift. Belgium's king ravaged the country, chopped off Congolese arms and legs, killed millions, and provided inspiration for Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness in 1899.
This year, as the Belgium state celebrates its 175th year, the country is about to confront its brutal past. That's much thanks to the American Adam Hochschild, who recently documented the atrocities. Official exhibits now acknowledge the colonial crimes in Congo.
Soon the Belgians might also admit their responsibility for the tragedy in Rwanda: The racial identity cards of Hutus versus Tutsis which Belgium imposed in the 1930s – and the recent French Hutu support – paved the way for the Rwandan killing fields in 1994.
2. Silence in France: A new film is confronting French brutality during Morocco's fight for independence in the mid-1950s. The magnificent film is called Le Regard (The Return), the first of its kind.
The film is not made in France, but rather supported by Norway and Morocco. The film director's name is Nour-Eddine Lakhmari, a Moroccan Norwegian.
The French still haven't faced their terrible "civilisation project". They are suppressing the memories of their suppression. While the Americans for decades have made films about their wars, and exported Vietnam-critical films like Platoon, France has refused.
The French public still do not realise how gruesomely their soldiers behaved during la sale gerre, the dirty war, in Algeria in late 1950s. Maybe as much as one million Algerians were killed, not to mention raped and wounded, just because France did not want to leave the illegally occupied country.
3. Pride in England: While France refused to leave their colonies in Vietnam, Algeria, and Morocco, Britain could not have left faster in countries like India and Palestine.
After growing rich on India for almost 200 years, the British empire in 1947 left the continent in just 72 days: Britain did not work either for a unified India, or for a non-violent division, or for a peaceful future in Kashmir with its foggy borders.
The same empire was responsible for the hands-off-policy towards the guerrilla war during the fatal, last days of the British Palestine Mandate in 1947-1948.
So, what is the British attitude towards its former crimes against Indian, Chinese, African and Arab peoples? They are actually proud of their colonial times, as Prince William's party outfit signals.
Prime Minister Tony Blair boasts that the British empire was "a remarkable achievement". Recently, Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, said "Britain should stop apologising for colonialism and be proud of its history".
They are backed by Niall Ferguson's Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World (2003). A bestseller which mocks Mahatma Gandhi and the UN declaration against racism.
He hails the former British empire as a necessity, and does not question its legitimacy. The Times declared Ferguson "the most brilliant British historian of his generation".
So what happened when Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins published in March, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya? Her work was ridiculed in papers such as The Independent.
Elkins documents how the British imprisoned 1.5 million Kenyans and killed tens of thousands of them during the Mau-Mau uprising in the 1950s. But Britain does not answer Kenya's demands for an apology.
The European empires are still the black man's burden.
Yet, we should forgive, we must move on. Maybe we should even forget about the past, so we can focus more on the future. But we should never let the European colonisers forget, nor let them be proud of their brutal suppression.
This is the main problem: They still don't know what they have done.

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Dag Herbjornsrud is a Norwegian author, journalist and historian of ideas.