austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

38 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
rebellion against their new rulers, a large Filipino resistance army had
seized almost the entire Philippines from the Spanish before USA troops
arrived, and the USA invaders had to wage an outright war against the
Filipino people until 1902 (and fight off sporadic Filipino resistance
until 19 15) in order to subdue the native population (Agoncillo, 1969).
In retaliation for the resistance to the USA's colonial conquest, the USA
directly massacred hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians, while
hundreds of thousands more died of starvation and disease trying to
escape the massacre-- over 600,000 were killed on the Luzon island
alone by early 190 1 according to the commanding USA general there
(Franklin Bell), and that was before numerous subsequent massacres, in
one of which over 100,000 more Filipinos on Luzon were killed according
to statistics compiled by USA government officials (Schirmer and
Shalom, 1987). A USA Congressman who observed the "pacification"
of the Philippines stated that the USA army "simply swept the country
and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed
him" (Kamow, 1989).
The USA first began its newest form of terrorism through aerial bombardments
of civilian targets in a war against enemies almost as atrocious
: Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. Although the Germans and Japanese
also committed terrible extermination campaigns in World War
II, there is little moral difference between the German and Japanese
killings of unarmed ci vilians perceived to be enemies and the USA's
slaughter of unarmed innocent German and Japanese civilians in its
deliberate terrorist bombardments of civilian targets, especially given
the many USA aerial attacks that were deliberately aimed at civilian
living quarters (M arkusen and Kopf, 1995). It should also be mentioned
that Churchill (1994) has uncovered documents indicating the Nazis
were merely following the USA's role model with respect to exterminating
unwanted people. While figures provided by Markusen and
Kopf (1995) indicate only 500,000 civilians killed by USA bombings
in World War II, Webster s ( 1992) reports well over I ,000,000 German
and Japanese civilian deaths in World War II. Since the USA dominated
the aerial terror bombing campaign (with the only other major player,
Britain, engaging in much smaller operations), most of those civilians
must have been killed by the USA (Markusen and Kopf, 1995).
As for more modem atrocities through USA aerial terrorist bomb-
iNTRODUCTION 39
ings, the slaughter of over 250,000 unarmed Laotian civilians during the
period 1965-73 and of over 500,000 innocent unarmed Cambodian civilians
during the 1969-73 interval (as estimated by the Finnish Inquiry
Commission) is indicative (Herman and Choms ky, 1988). These exterminations
occurred at a time when there were no Cambodians or Laotians
fighting Americans in any form. Given the fanatical anticommunism
of many brainwashed Americans who do not perceive communists
as people worthy of life, it should also be mentioned that few if any of
the Cambodians and Laotians were even communists initially.
Although in Vietnam there were indeed armed communist guerrillas
fighting Americans, they were actually only struggling for the right to
the free elections that the French bad promised upon their departure
from the colony (Blum, 1995). Slaughtering possibly as many as ten
innocent civilians with terrorist aerial bombings for every one "enemy"
soldier killed (successfully exterminating an estimated 1,000,000 civilians
by 1970) seems to represent deliberate murder, especially if these
actions are considered in the light of the various extermination statements
made by American leaders at the time (Herman, 1970). To try
and justify such actions as being part of normal warfare is tantamount
to trying to justify Hitler 's mass murder of the Jews because a small
fraction might have taken up arms against him (Markusen and Kopf,
1995).
Thayer (1985) cites estimates of only 200,000-400,000 civilians
having died in Vietnam, but his figures are based on the number Qf civilians
being admitted to South Vietnamese hospitals, and these numbers
ignore the massive number of civilians killed in remote or communistcontrolled
areas where USA air attacks were concentrated. While an
exact figure for the number of Vietnamese civilians murdered by the
USA is not known, McNamara (1999) bas cited Vietnamese government
evidence of over one million Vietnamese civilian and military casualties
per year, implying that millions of civilians were killed during the
period of the heaviest USA involvement between 1965 and 1973, since
estimates of military deaths (which may be more accurately measured)
are only a million or so for the whole war (Bums and Lei ten berg, 1984).
Vietnam officially reports 2 million civilian dead (CNN, 2000b), which
would imply far more than 1 million maliciously murdered by the USA,
given that Thayer 's ( 1985) data imply collateral civilian casualties from