Accusations of genocide in Gaza are present everywhere except where most people get their news—mainstream media—but is it fair to call the military action in Gaza a genocide? Is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intentionally trying to kill every Palestinian, women and children included, as part of a territorial expansion program called Greater Israel that might include a Trump Riviera? According to a UN resolution, “genocide” requires “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Anthony Aguilar—a retired Green Beret and recipient of a Purple Heart—spent several months in Gaza at an aid distribution site under contract from a US motorcycle club whose charter calls for the elimination of all Muslims. Based on his experience with IDF personnel at the site, nothing less than genocide fits the description of what he witnessed.
Since we can’t measure intent objectively, it might be more accurate to call the action in Gaza an unspeakable atrocity. One could argue that war itself is atrocious but certain incidents stand out as deserving widespread condemnation if only because of the horror they elicit.
The My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968 shocked Americans when it was reported 18 months later by journalist Seymour Hersh because it amounted to the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese, including women, children, and babies. American soldiers,
…burned homes and destroyed livestock. There were rapes. The GIs suffered but one casualty, a self-inflicted wound to a single soldier. The company’s after-action report counted 128 “enemy” dead and—tellingly—three weapons captured. An official account boasted that Task Force Barker had “crushed an enemy stronghold.” . . . Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, decorated many years later. . .protected a small group of Vietnamese by threatening his fellow soldiers with his machine guns.
Lieutenant William Calley Jr., perhaps a patsy, was the only soldier convicted of criminal offenses and was originally given a life sentence under house arrest but had it commuted after three and a half years.
My Lai was only the most notorious Vietnam war crime. More recently, declassified Pentagon papers detailed 320 “alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators,” not including My Lai.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.
Is the US today, trying to keep its hands clean by avoiding direct assault on an enemy and instead providing only funds, ordnance, and cheerleading to conduct military operations? Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the heavily-indebted US has spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel, excluding “tens of billions of dollars in arms sales agreements that have been committed for weapons and services that will be paid for and delivered in the years to come.”
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the headline figure for its proxy war in Ukraine is about $195 billion that includes $20 billion in frozen Russian assets. With lax accountability, it’s not surprising charges of corruption are now threatening Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party.
Total War Against Civilians
In his 2012 book, Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, Thomas J. Dilorenzo discusses how government directs its coercive and propaganda forces to any group that threatens the ruling regime. He draws on the work of sociologist R. J. Rummel and his research into genocide and government mass murder (what he called “democide”), and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by various French authors.
According to The Black Book, DiLorenzo says,
…the Soviets murdered at least 20 million of their own citizens; the Chinese socialists killed 65 million; Vietnamese socialists murdered 1 million; the North Koreans killed 2 million; 1 million perished in Eastern Europe; 150,000 in Latin America; 1.7 million in Africa; and 1.5 million in Afghanistan. In addition to this, Professor Rummel included in his estimate 21 million civilians murdered by the Nazi government.
DiLorenzo notes that in Rummel’s Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence, rulers of democidal regimes become more aggressive toward populations that are incompatible with the regime’s agenda. “In light of this reasoning,” DiLorenzo writes, “there appears to be a glaring omission in the literature on ‘democide,’ namely, the 350,000 or more residents of the Southern states who perished as a result of the Lincoln regime’s invasion and waging of total war on them from 1861–1865.”
Lincoln argued,
…that the secession of the Southern states was merely a “rebellion” by a minority of fire eaters and was therefore illegitimate. He always considered every Southerner, from Robert E. Lee to the lowliest yeoman farmer, to be a U.S. citizen. His waging of total war on his own citizens, therefore, qualifies as an act of democide as defined by Professor Rummel.
New estimates of Southern deaths put the total at around 400,000, and—if accepted and standardized for today’s population—would make Lincoln “more than twice as bad as the Pol Pot and North Korean communists and four times worse than the Vietnamese communists in terms of democide.”
In War Crimes Against Southern Civilians author Walter Cisco argues that Lincoln—a well-known micromanager—approved total war against Southerners. Known as the “black flag” policy, the “crushing of secession justified the severest of measures.”
Shelling and burning of cities, systematic destruction of entire districts, mass arrests, forced expulsions, wholesale plundering of personal property, even murder all became routine.
At the beginning of his infamous march through Georgia, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman declared, “Let us destroy Atlanta and make it a desolation,” which at the time consisted mostly of civilians and slaves. Union cannon rained heavy shells on the city for three weeks. “There seemed no end to the carnage. . . One surgeon reported having performed 107 amputations on men, women, and children.”
Three months after Appomattox, Sherman, General Phillip Sheridan, and other Civil War luminaries took aim at the Plains Indians, in what was called the “final solution” to the Indian problem—a campaign of ethnic genocide—deemed necessary for the construction of the transcontinental railroad. “Sherman’s theory of white racial superiority,” DiLorenzo writes in a 2003 article, “is what led him to the policy of waging war against the Indians ‘till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.’”
The war against Southerners for wanting a country of their own and the twenty-five year war against the Plains Indians (1865-1890) could be considered trial runs for what is now called the Philippine-American War that lasted three years (1899-1902) and resulted in the deaths of 200,000 Filipino civilians from “violence, famine, and disease.” Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo wanted independence rather than a change in colonial rulers (which had been Spain).
Conclusion
Historians still rank Lincoln as the greatest US president, presumably because the war he initiated on behalf of northern banking and industrial interests ended plantation slavery and prevented the secession of the South. The Union which he claimed to be the object of his war was redefined from a federation of independent states to a collection of states held at federal gunpoint. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune on August 22, 1862.
Four days before his death, speaking to General Benjamin Butler, Lincoln said, “I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes… I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country…” The Great Emancipator could have been the Great Expeller.
Not all Union generals supported Lincoln’s idea of total war. General Joshua Chamberlain—having burnt the homes of women and children at Grant’s order—wrote to his sister: “I am willing to fight men in arms, but not babes in arms.” Chamberlain’s view is nowhere to be found in today’s ongoing armed conflicts. If total war turns nuclear, total war will no longer be a concern.
