How genocides are laboratories for bigger genocides
While the Western “international community” actively arms and promotes the project for 2+ million Palestinians displaced, 100,000+ injured, 40,000+ dead, 10,000+ forcibly disappeared by death squads or buried under rubble in Gaza (half of all these figures, children), the first genocide completely registered by cell phones and social media (even by the Zionists themselves) offers statistic, strategic and tactical research to the future of clandestine counterinsurgency and imperialist onslaught. While the world “authorities” turn a blind eye to daily massacres, the tools of future genocides will be upgraded to the standards of contemporary technology and arms manufacturing.
Could peaceful coexistence already be a dream of decades past, aimed to achieve that the imperialists lay down their arms and turn them into scrap through strategic patience?
To cite the judge and reference for human rights, Raul Zaffaroni of Argentina, genocides began with the Conquest of the Americas. [1] If European markets learning that gold was in the Americas was enough to underdevelop the Indian and Chinese economies, heavily dependent on mineral production, this would be a stepping stone to the technological theft from the great industrial centres of these two Asian giants, leading to the colonisation of India and the dependisation of China to Indian grown opium. A great amount of capital was needed for industrial development, and especially, of the military sort, which would be used by Europe to finally follow through with the conquest and colonisation of Africa. This setting into place of world affairs by the Europeans a process of over 400 years–each a leap from one genocide to the next.
The accumulation of the industriousness of killing culminated in the Great Imperialist War and later the Great Patriotic War, to make a long story short. Which would be immediately followed by wars and struggles for independence, and more sophisticated monopoly forms known as mass culture and mass media. A struggle of cultures, and behind them, politico-economic worldviews, was waged from East to West, and from North to South. Propaganda was now to be waged on ideological terms, not simple wardrum-beating nationalism. With the manipulation of the mind, came too a focus on the limits of the human body and brain through refined and industrialised torture techniques, no longer to deliver an excruciating and inquisitive death, but instead to keep the tortured subject alive and conscious for as long as possible, a death in life of sorts.
Fast forward to 2024, with an ongoing and growing genocide, i.e. the resurfacing of fascism and political violence, along with a climate catastrophe with no end in sight, millions more entering the world migrant crisis, old forms of struggle are soon becoming obsolete, dying out, decomposing and giving birth to new forms of struggle, combining the old and the new. After all, in many places around the world, it is the same cadres who once lifted the sword who are now employing the pen, and more and more, vice versa. An example of the latter is the transformation of the Great March of Return into the Al-Aqsa Flood. Once peaceful, or defensive resistance is met with violence, so must it inevitably enter a counteroffensive, and confront that violence with greater violence. Because, as thinkers like F. Fanon or J. W. Cooke would explain, the crucial choice between retreating and attacking in any resistance movement is a lose-lose situation. You fight, you die. You do nothing, you die.
This is why Lenin told us that “[i]f you don’t interfere in politics, eventually, politics will interfere with your life”. Mao would add that “[t]o die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather”. [2]
While, in some places, it could be argued that history was put “on pause” since the fall of the Second World, the so-called “end of history” would imply that the US and its NATO lackeys would have ceased to exist and terrorise humanity, which is far from the case. No need to look further than West Asia. Although liberalism has renovated in order to fit the democratic agenda, its electoral form is also running dry.
If we think of neoliberalism at its peak, we imagine upward transfers of capital from the Global South, cuts to spending and inflation, projects by or for the North that relied on the vacuum of power created from the illegal dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the entering of vultures to buy up the scraps at penny cost. This was a process that, during the 90s, happened throughout the Global South also. With brand new lands to conquer, globalisation felt replenished and flourished into the fruits of the free market that were no more than an illusion of seemingly infinite consumption. It finally started to seem like liberal shock therapy cookbooks no longer need military coups to take power. Though, it would all start to tumble in the 2008 crisis. And the Covid-19 pandemic would come to further uncover the flaws within that system. Just keeping in mind this recent history, it makes the current crisis a much eerier subject to fathom.
The genocide and regional war in West Asia, the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, Taiwan in the sights, and a promise from the presidential hopeful Donald Trump that he would take the trade war to new levels–applying a 100% tariff on all countries that attempt to dedolarise–in other words, the US is now pivoting from Asia to a multi-front battleground against the entire Global South. [3] If the liberation from European colonialism was with a weak and decaying Europe, the ongoing liberation from US imperialism and its lackeys confronts us with a power that surpasses its predecessor tenfold in its capacity for annihilation.
Why is this genocide a laboratory for bigger genocides?
It would be unwise to make such a claim without citing a precedent:
The Argentine armed forces received expert counterinsurgency training from the “battle-hardened (implying these were battles against a rival army, and not majoritarily civilian targets)” French military, which showcased in occupied Algeria its forced evolution of war theory to fight the new menace known as the national liberation movements, after their swift defeat and exit from Indochina. These were political movements overall. Though this period is trifled with armed freedom fighters, the greatest efforts were made in the streets and neighbourhoods through political agitation. For the fighters in the mountains, getting news of resistance in the cities and suburbs would bring new life to the wartorn fighters. And vice versa, for the militant resisting at the base, knowing there are comrades in the mountains holding the line gives them a breath of hope to continue the fight. This dialectical to-and-fro is what brought the theory of modern war to view the communist threat as a global threat, and the warzone, would be the whole territory. The enemies are no longer armies, but instead, entire populations.
This was the pretext for the genocide of 1973–1983. Armed forces and police were dressed in civillian clothing and transported in unmarked vehicles as death squads to clandestinely abduct, torture, and give a death at sea sanctified by a Catholic priest, drugged and thrown from airplanes to the River Plate. This was the fate of 30,000+ forcibly disappeared people, in their majority, base militants who provided social assistance to vulnerable and poverty stricken territories, organised student and labor unions, and other forms of militancy. In their majority, they were members of Marxist or other national liberation movements. Not only would this effort from the CIA-backed military junta decimate an entire generation, it would also consequently terrorise the civilian population out of speaking out for years to come, depoliticised at work, school, church and home, even long after the transition “back” to democracy.
Children were no limit to the dictatorship, as pregnant mothers were kidnapped, their newborns abducted, robbed of their identities and distributed to rich and/or military families. Dozens of those children are still being looked for by their families, over 40 years on.
Not long after the dictatorship ended, the new democratic government towed the “theory of two demons”, where the disappeared were placed at the same level of the genocidaires, claiming that a “dirty war” was being fought, and though the military were brutal in their repression, those who disappeared “must have done something” to deserve it, as all were involved in reckless bomb placements that put civil society in harm’s way. A closer look shows this is far from the truth, yet the effects of this “theory of two demons” are felt to this day.
Why bring up this example? Think of the genocide currently being perpetrated by the Israeli Occupation Forces–backed by president Javier Milei of Argentina (more firmly than even the very United States government), an open negationist of the genocide in his own country; torture; mass killings; forced disappearances; no reserves with killing children; all under a pretext that it is a “war against Hamas”, or “against Hezbollah”, etc. and not an active effort to decimate a defenseless civilian population. The cherry on the cake is that Israel had supported the last Argentine dictatorship once the US could no longer keep sending it arms, even after it was known that a disproportionate amount of Jewish militants who were forcibly disappeared by the junta that Tony Greenstein righteously dares to call “neo-Nazi” in his book “Zionism During the Holocaust: The weaponisation of memory in the service of state and nation”.
If we can make the connection between Manifest Destiny > Lebensraum > “A land without a people for a people without a land”, we find that genocide is a practice that has been fine-tuned and perfected over the centuries. Settler-colonial statecraftmanship takes inspiration from previous attempts to exterminate one or another particular group.
The moral of this David and Goliath story seems to be that in resisting, in defending and counterattacking, we are not only saving a life, or a hundred lives. Potentially, our efforts have the power to prevent future, more sophisticated and unsurmountable mass-murdering machines for all the future generations.
Written by Joel Ruggi
Administrative Editor
Unsettling Empire
Bibliography
[1] Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, El derecho latinoamericano en la fase superior del colonialismo, Revista Internacional de História Política e Cultura Jurídica (Rio de Janeiro, 2015) p. 182–243
[2] Mao Tse-Tung, Serve the People, Selected Works (1944) — marxists.org
[3] Ben Norton, Trump threatens to punish de-dollarization: ‘I would not allow countries to go off the dollar’, Geopolitical Economy Report (2024) — geopoliticaleconomy.com
