american-holocaust

254 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTit a battle of annihilation," he said; it was "literally about to become thebattle of Cannae, a battle of annihilation" before-to his disappointment-thegeneral was called of£. 21It should be noted that the third century B.C. battle of Cannae, duringwhich Carthaginian troops under the command of Hannibal almost completelyexterminated a group of 80,000 to 90,000 Romans, is still regardedas an exemplar of total destructiveness to military historians. Even today,Italians living in the region where the attack took place refer to the site ofthe massacre as Campo di Sangue, or "Field of Blood." In his own words,this is what General Norman Schwarzkopf had hoped to create in Iraq.And when confronted by the press with evidence that appeared to demonstratethe American government's lack of concern for innocent civilians(including as many as 55,000 children) who died as a direct consequenceof the war-and with a United States medical team's estimate that hundredsof thousands more Iraqi children were likely to die of disease and starvationcaused by the bombing of civilian facilities-the Pentagon's responseeither was silence, evasion, or a curt "war is hell." 22Indeed it is. The purpose of this brief tour across several recent battlegroundsis not simply to condemn what is so easily condemnable, however,but rather to illustrate how close to the surface of everyday life is thecapacity for racist dehumanization and consequently massive devastation.For among the many things that warfare does is temporarily define theentire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable-a redefinition thatmust take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre innocent peopleand remain shielded from self-condemnation. And nothing is more helpfulto that political and psychological transformation than the availability ofa deep well of national and cultural consciousness that consigns wholecategories of people to the distant outback of humanity.But even the worst wars end. Military defeat leads to political surrender,for it is politics that most wars are about. Genocide is different. Thepurpose of genocide is to do away with an entire people, or to indiscriminatelyconsume them, either by outright mass murder or by creating conditionsthat lead to their oblivion. Thus, the slave labor projects that workedpeople to death in the synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz, or in thenearby coal mines, were no less genocidal than the gas chambers there andin other camps. Moreover, although Arno J. Mayer may well be correct incontending that "from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probablyoverall, more Jews [in the camps] were killed by so-called "natural" causesthan by "unnatural" ones-"natural" causes being "sickness, disease, undernourishment,[and] hyperexploitation," as opposed to "unnatural" causessuch as "shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing" -there can be nodenying, as Mayer himself insists, that those who died "naturally" wereno less victims of genocide than others who were murdered outright. 23