What is the world to do about major human rights atrocities and catastrophes that undeniably do occur today? Certainly, the world must not accord the great military powers such as the United States, the NATO states, Russia, and China some fictive right of "humanitarian intervention" that these powerful states will only abuse and manipulate in order to justify military aggressions against less powerful states and peoples for their own selfish interests. There is no need to alter or update presently existing international law in order to expand the possibilities for a military "responsibility to protect" in response to purportedly new exigencies of the day-there are more than enough international laws and international organizations to deal with major human rights atrocities and catastrophes going on around the world today. The demand to do so reflects a political agenda seeking legal legitimacy, not a deficit in the existing law.

Indeed, behind most of the major human rights atrocities and catastrophes in the world today humankind has seen in operation the Machiavellian machinations of the great military powers. So it should have come as no surprise that the world witnessed outright genocide inflicted by Serbia and its Milosevic government against the Kosovar Albanians immediately after the United States and the NATO states launched their illegal war against Serbia in March of 1999, a genocide which NATO admittedly anticipated but which in actuality transpired as the direct result of its aggression. Of course the nominally Christian United States and NATO states could not care less about the basic human rights of Kosovar Albanians, most of whom are Muslims. Soon thereafter, the world witnessed once again outright genocide inflicted by Indonesia against the people of East Timor after decades of military and economic support had been provided to the genocidal military dictatorship ruling Indonesia by the United States and Britain-"our kind of guy," as the Clinton administration publicly referred to the genocidaire Suharto when he came to visit the United States.

Also in this regard, the world must never forget that the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, and Latin America have been subjected to continuing acts of genocide for over the past 500 years, all in the guise of bringing civilization. How can the United States and its NATO ally Canada talk about a "humanitarian mission" in Afghanistan when both states have a long history of practicing "humanitarian extinction" at home? Despite the slogan and the rhetoric of "Never again!" that was used with respect to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, toward the start of the twentieth-first century, genocide has become an increasingly familiar and acceptable tool for powerful states to wield against weaker states and peoples.

No state has the right or standing under international law to launch an illegal military attack upon another U.N. member state in the name of "humanitarian intervention." This principle applies to both the United States and Canada, which are today continuing to extinguish the indigenous peoples who live within their imperial domains under concepts similar to humanitarianism, if not so-labeled. It applies to Britain's prolonged colonial occupation of Ireland as well as its deportation of the people of Diego Garcia. It applies to the outright genocides Italy inflicted against the peoples of Libya and Ethiopia; those perpetrated by Spain and Portugal against the indigenous peoples of Latin America; the monstrous genocide committed by Belgium in the Congo; and the genocides committed by France in Algeria and Vietnam, all of whom averred their colonized peoples had been the better for it.

How could NATO member Turkey ever credibly claim some fictive right of "humanitarian intervention" anywhere given its longstanding campaign to submerge the Kurds as well as its previous extermination of the Armenians, a genocide which it still denies today. Only the Nazi-German genocide against the Jews in Germany and elsewhere has been recognized for what it was. Yet today a generation later the gullible world is supposed to believe the NATO fairy-tale that the German Wehrmacht is now on some type of "humanitarian" mission in Afghanistan. The wanton aggression by the U.S.-U.K. and their "Coalition of the Willing" against Iraq in the name of bringing human rights and democracy has resulted in four million refugees, over a million Iraqi deaths, and the wholesale destruction of the country's infrastructure - outright genocide.

The United States and its NATO Alliance constitute the greatest collection of genocidal states ever assembled in the entire history of the world. If anything the United Nations Organization and its member states bear a "responsibility to protect" the U.S. and NATO's intended victims from their repeated aggressions as they should have done for Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and now Palestine. The United States and the NATO Alliance together with their de facto allies such as Israel constitute the real Axis of Genocide in the modern world. Humanity bears a "responsibility to protect" the very future existence of the world from the United States and NATO.

(from "Tackling America's Toughest Questions", now at Amazon.com)

http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3755