Will the word 'holocaust' be used to describe the deaths of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Iranians targeted for extermination by the Bush administration and the American military? Perhaps.
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god.
Strikes on 1,200 targets and post-attack foreseeable dislocations will kill millions of innocent men, women and children across Iran in a burnt offering to the American Christianist god.
Other parallels with last century's holocausts abound. In particular, the Iranians have been the victims of an orchestrated campaign of hate-mongering propaganda in American media and intellectual circles as a prelude to justifying violence.
Propaganda as an forerunner of violence against a targeted group of civilians is perhaps the distinguishing feature of modern holocausts. The Armenians were set up with propaganda before the cattle trucks started rolling along the shiny new German-built railway lines to the Ottoman Empire's death camps.
Wikipedia:
"In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening the straits [of the Dardanelles]."
As Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, reported this week, the efforts to demonise Iran in justification of attacks are so serious that any journalist, soldier or official who might object places their career at risk. A compliant American media and political elite prefers to appease the masters close to home rather than express solidarity with those innocent men, women and children targeted for extinction far away.
With the Armenian holocaust as now, many supposedly enlightened intellectuals defended the actions of the authorities as essentially a housekeeping exercise that would be justified by the outcome. The quote below from a German at the time gives a chilling view of the arguments that would be used 20 years later to justify another holocaust against a different religious and ethnic group.
"I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life," he told me, "and I know the Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I don't blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no right to exist here."
Indeed, the Germans observing the Armenian holocaust seem to have adopted many of its more efficient techniques in designing their own:
Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.
Naturally, the American government will express concern and consideration for Iranians as it kills them - saying that its actions are for their own protection. Given that Iran has better eletrification, sewerage, education and healthcare than other countries in the region, it is hard to see how bombing their infrastructure into dust to loot their economy will benefit the people our government characterises as "oppressed". Certainly, any Iranian looking at our efforts either north to Afghanistan or west to Iraq could be forgiven for scepticism - and might well prefer a comfortable, hygenic, literate and healthy oppression to the American-sponsored alternative on offer.
Lying to the international community about the welfare of victims while instigating a holocaust also has its historical parallels. From Robert Fisk and the Independent:
Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Perhaps 'holocaust' is too charged a word. Maybe you would prefer 'genocide'? That might be a good choice.
The word 'genocide' was coined as a criminalogical descriptor of crimes against an innocent people in aid of nationalist goals. Should the United States attack Iran to impose as US-friendly regime and US-style corporatist exploitation of oil, that will certainly be a crime within the usage of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish scholar who coined the term genocide in 1944.
"Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor" (1944, p. 80).
America is already responsible for the deaths of over one million Iraqis, but as these deaths have mostly occured chaotically through unforced displacement of refugees, starvation, disease and uncoordinated acts of violence by many non-government and non-military groups, the deaths of these Iraqis count as neither a holocaust nor a genocide.
Should America launch a barrage of air strikes at 1,200 targets within Iran, however, either holocaust or genocide might be used appropriately in the history books to come. Supporting such usage, we can evidence:
- the motive of instituting our own preferred system of governance and subjugation of the survivors,
- orchestration of attacks by the American government and military as official policy,
- target preparation by propaganda in our media to chacterise the Iranians as a unique identity and constituting an exaggerated threat to our security, and
- the victimisation of Iranians has been allowed to proceed without interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies through political opposition, regligious leadership or interested human rights lobby groups.
So, how many dead Iranians in a 'holocaust'? How many in a 'genocide'?
I hope we never find out because I will forever be shamed to be a national of a country that perpetrates such a crime.