Why Is This 'News'?
Last night a Faux News headline blurted out that Senator John McCain wants "us" to bomb Syria. This is news? Come on, Faux, REAL news would be an interview with John "Dr. Strangelove" McCain in which he is asked, "Whom should we bomb next?" and he answers: "Well, no one that I can think of for now."
The rationale the neocons give for going on endless invading, bombing, murdering, destroying, and occupying binges is that the governments of the targeted countries are oppressive and are even killing some of their own citizens. In his book, Power Kills, R. J. Rummel writes that "democidal" regimes that murder their own citizens become more vicious when their political power is "conjoined with an absolutist ideology" and that war provides "an excuse and cover for a regime to eliminate those social groups it finds objectionable" (p. 93).
Rummel estimated the millions killed by their own governments in the U.S.S.R, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. But he left out one important country, one in which the government killed some 350,000 of its own citizens for resisting its "authority" while maiming for life more than double that number. I speak of course of the U.S. government during the Lincoln regime, which did all of this in the name of "American exceptionalism." They were right, this was an "exceptional" act of barbarism at a time when the population of the U.S. was one-tenth of what it is today. Standardizing for today's population, this would be the equivalent of 3.5 million deaths. If Rummel were to include this particular act of "democide' it would rank the Lincoln regime slightly above Pol Pot's Cambodia.
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