State of Darkness

Most adults in North America remember Christopher Columbus as the explorer who discovered the New World in 1492.  However, few are aware of the fact that Columbus returned to the New World in 1493 to conquer the local inhabitants and steal their wealth.  When Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean, there were approximately eight million native inhabitants but when he departed in 1500, his savagery and brutality had reduced their numbers to 100,000.  “Columbus Day” is a celebration of a mass murderer.

When colonists arrived at Plymouth colony in 1620, they were rescued by the local inhabitants who shared their food and taught them how to farm.  The reward for their generosity was extermination.  How ironic that the celebration of Thanksgiving is tantamount to giving thanks to the generosity of the natives for sharing their food and their subsequent extermination.

Plymouth Rock was only one case of extermination in a plethora of massacres, the result of which was the reduction of the American native population by 97.5 percent as of 1890.  Thus, Americans committed genocide against their native population.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide had its roots in the Turkish massacre of the Armenian population which inspired a Polish Jew and international lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to launch a crusade to create an international law to prevent massacres on this scale from ever happening again.  His crusade reached a crossroads when atrocities committed by the Third Reich were uncovered.  Before presenting his case to the international community, he needed a new name for a crime in which a whole population was destroyed.  Lemkin realized that he needed a word that was truly unique and decided to combine the Greek derivative geno meaning “race” or “tribe” with the Latin derivative cide meaning “killing” resulting in the word “genocide”.

Lemkin’s dedication and unflagging efforts resulted in the passage of the Genocide Convention by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948.  However, it was not until January 12, 1951, that the law came into force after ratification by 20 nations excluding the United States.

Fearful of attention focusing on the genocide of Native Americans and treatment of Blacks in the South, the United States did not ratify the Convention for another 38 years.  A Senator, William Proxmire, embraced the cause and his dedication resulted in ratification.

There are a number of ambiguities and controversies in the Convention which required resolution including whether or not to include political parties, despite the fact that they are not explicitly mentioned in the Convention.  By considering the works of scholars in the field and judgments of the International Criminal Court, a set of rigid criteria are established in this book to determine the guilt or innocence of the U.S. in the examples set out in the following chapters.

Truman committed genocide when he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atom weapons.  When Eisenhower orchestrated the overthrow of democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz in