How They/We Stood By

Except for the most right-leaning ideologues, most rational people accept the historical accuracy of The Holocaust. As summarized by Wikipedia,

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt"), also known as The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban,[3] from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, throughout Nazi-occupied territory. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds perished. More than one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.

One of the questions asked by people in our day and age is: How could the German people simply sit by and allow this to happen?

Well, we shouldn't act so high and mighty because a new sort of Holocaust is happening in our midst and we aren't doing much of anything to stop it either! This time around the primary target group is not the Jews; it's the Muslims. Led by the zealous designs of US leaders and ably assisted by the Brits, we are systematically going from Arab country to Arab country murdering people because, in part, of their religious beliefs.

While the Nazis preferred method of extermination was the ovens, ours increasingly has become the use of drones. Add to this bombs dropped by aircraft and missiles launched from ships or land and we have perfected a strategy for raining terror down on innocents without too much need for face-to-face slaughter.

This is not to suggest that our foot soldiers don't play a part too. Via WikiLeaks, we've learned of several occasions in which US and/or NATO troops have murdered families at pointblank range.

I realize that a lot of people will cringe at the thought that US aggression rivals Nazi aggression. Some will claim that we have strict military objectives, while the Nazis merely were pursuing their own form of ethnic cleansing. Others will point out that while the Jews posed no terrorist threat to the Nazi regime, there are Muslim zealots out there whose sworn duty is to kill Americans.

I grant there are differences in circumstance, but the vast majority of people we are killing are not terrorists. They are average people who are caught between the terrorists and the imperialist aggressors (that's us). While wealth -- most often in the form of oil -- appears to be the prime motivator for our machinations, a casual observer could also note that we seem to be hellbent on religious cleansing. We aren't attacking any non-Muslim countries who possess oil (like Canada or Venezuela).

Conservative estimates are that our military endeavors have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen. Some have theorized that the total death toll tops one million people. Whatever the number is, it continues to grow day-by-day. And, even if we ceased all military operations tomorrow, the death toll will continue to climb in the not-so-near future because of our use of weapons coated with depleted uranium and our conscious strategy to destroy the health and safety infrastructure of the nations we've targeted.

Fifty years from now, people may look back on this history of atrocities to ask: Why did the American people passively sit by to allow this to happen?

If a few of us are still around, what in the hell could we say in our own defense?