National Security has to be seen holistically and in non-linear ways. What do I mean by that? I mean that contrary to how we have been taught throughout U.S. history, that "National Security" is about defense against foreign and domestic enemies with their own "Regime Change" ideas, and thus a strong military and police apparatus is the central key to national security, it is about a lot more than that.
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For example, even with the best and most sophisticated military and police hardware available, what good is it if you do not have personnel educated well enough to read technical manuals to figure out how to use it most effectively and fix it? Thus high quality and accessible education is vital to national security. What good is state-of-the-art hardware if your personnel are not physically healthy enough to use it and/or emotionally healthy enough to be trusted with it? Or what good is all of it if your personnel do not have stable homes and families to come home to? Or what good is all that military and police hardware and doctrine if you have a society and system not worth protecting (in which "Regime Change" is necessary for rather than a threat to "national security") and not likely to induce a whole lot of people to want to protect it?
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In an increasingly interdependent and potentially dangerous world, one in which the U.S. cannot go it alone, we need allies and we will not get and keep them, and we will have no moral or legal authority to lecture anyone about anything, if we do not walk our talk. Credibility is a national security asset; it is key to multilateralizing defenses etc.
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So just imagine if the Turkish Government just says Fuck You! You talk to us about Genocide, yet you, the U.S., the major force at the Nuremberg Trials, that spawned the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, that same Convention it took you 40 years to get around signing, and then even now, 9 of your closest allies do not consider you a full signatory to it. And the transcripts from the 84th and 85th U.S. Congresses show that you were concerned about signing the UN Convention on Genocide as you would be the first to be charged under it because of historical treatment of Indians and Blacks under Jim Crow laws: To quote from the Blackfoot Indictment:
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The U.S. Government and the Canadian Government (represented by the British Government) were major forces initiating and conducting the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and those Tribunals were a major force in the origination and content of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Yet the U.S. Government did not ratify the UN Convention on Genocide until 1988, forty years after the original UN Convention on Genocide. Further, the U.S. government summarily placed a “restriction” on its ratification of the UN Convention on Genocide known as the “Lugar-Helms-Hatch Sovereignty Package” which stated in Article I (2):
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Nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.
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This is a clear violation of Article 27 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as the definitive international law on treaties) as it is in violation of Article VI, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution itself:
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[treaties are] the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
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Documents of the U.S. Government reveal clearly consciousness of guilt on the part of the Government and its agencies. Debates in the U.S. Senate reveal that there was a general awareness of and fear that the U.S. Government could/would be charged with genocide and related acts for historical and present-day policies and actions related to African-Americans and American Indians.
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The Government of Canada was even more ingenuous in its duplicity and attempts to appear to ratify the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide while effectively obstructing its recognition and application. The government of Canada put the crime of genocide in the criminal code of Canada as a crime. However, of the five specific acts mentioned as constituting genocide in Article II of the UN Convention on Genocide,three were deleted from the definition of genocide in the Canadian criminal code. So from Article II of the Genocide Convention, b) “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, and d)“Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and e)“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” were deliberately not included in the Canadian criminal code definition of the crime of genocide. Only a) [deliberate] killing members of the group, and part of c) an intentional plan to “bring about the physical destruction the group in whole or in part” were retained. The clear intent was to make the definition of “intent” very narrow and the proving of mens rea or intent next to impossible--and therefore prosecution next to impossible to pursue. Indeed there has been only one case of anyone being charged with the Canadian Criminal Code’s “genocide” and that resulted in an acquittal.
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Or, it is absolutely true that Hitler drew some of his "inspiration" for genocide (possible methods, scopes, depths, methods of cover-ups, methods of getting masses of non-targeted populations to buy into it and accept it and not oppose it) from the Armenian Genocide. He even openly said "Who remembers or cares about the Armenians?" But, in addition to the British treatment of the Boers in South Africa, Hitlere's main inspiration, from his own mouth:
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According to James Pool in his “Hitler and His Secret Partners”:
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Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.
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He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations his hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease. (p. 273-274).
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And:
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The next morning Hitler’s ‘plan’ was put in writing and sent out to the German occupation authorities as ‘The Fuehrer’s Guidelines for the Government of the Eastern Territories: ‘ the Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives and practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient… if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy.
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Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.’
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Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said:‘For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as ‘Redskins’. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or ‘Redskins’. ‘I don’t see why’, he said, ‘a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” (James
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Pool, Ibid, pp. 254-255)
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And from a speech by Heinrich Himmler (date not given):
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I consider that in dealing with members of a foreign country, especially some Slav nationality…in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary, by robbing or stealing them… (Telford Taylor “Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials”, Alfred A Knopf, N.Y. 1992, p. 203)
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And from John Toland, preeminent biographer of Adolf Hitler:
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Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity. (John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976)
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Then what happens when the Turkish Government says and by the way, Fuck You again because what did or did not happen with the Armenians was some 90 years ago, whereas what you and your buddies the Canadians are doing, the stuff that directly inspired Hitler, you are doing right now, as we speak, while you dare to lecture the world about human rights.
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THAT, dear friends, is my main reason for raising the issue of Indigenous Peoples and what is happening to them in the Americas. I have never been, nor will I ever be, into "Identity Politics". Why? Because Identity Politics, is really about selfishness, myopia and I, I, I, ME ,ME,ME and MY groups and how much WE have suffered and this leads to the rank-ordering of humanity and the rank-ordering of Holocausts and Genocides into worthy and non-worthy of being remembered or who suffered "the most".
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And that is what Nazis Do.
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I raise these issues because until and unless we walk our talk, not only do we have no business lecturing anyone about anything, or waxing poetic about supposed "American Values and Ideals", but we compromise our ability to raise multilateral defenses and alliances against real threats to U.S. national and indeed planetary security.
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NI KSO KO WA (We are all related in Blackfoot language)
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