It was towards the end of the 12th century that Genghis Khan united the Mongols, and forged from their ranks the most efficient and destructive army of the age. By the time this army had moved from the Pacific all the way to Hungary, millions upon millions had been beheaded, disemboweled, crippled, or made homeless.
When Genghis died in 1227 at the age of 67 it seemed as if a scythe, driven by a whirlwind, had moved through the vast stretch of land that his armies had traversed. Those conversant with the history of that time could therefore be forgiven for concluding that it was “barbarians” who committed the greatest crimes against humanity. A closer look at history though, would instruct them otherwise i.e. that it was the most “civilized and advanced” who have vied for this prominence through the ages; and that in each such case divinity, in some measure, was invoked in the commission of these crimes. This invocation Genghis strenuously avoided. This placed him apart from the others who visited “barbarity” on humanity.
So, what would be the criteria for shortlisting such crimes for their “greatness”? In my book these would be the numbers affected, the time over which such crimes were committed, and the overt cruelty they entailed.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted about 400 years, and though it did not quite touch so many people directly, its cruelty was unimaginable. The church fathers burnt people at the stake for the good reason that God did not like bloodshed. And so they roasted them instead!
It was none but the Pope who issued the first license to Portugal to begin the African slave trade. From capturing the slaves, through the middle passage, to their auctions at ports of landing, and eventually their final destinations at the plantations were, each step of the way, a study in extreme cruelty.
To begin with, the negro was not considered human. Then he was considered part-human, the offspring of a white man who had mated with an ape! The next major “improvement” in his biological status came with the admission that, though he was human, mentally he was destined to remain a “child”. And the God-fearing Christian eventually made himself believe that though the negro was fully human, he was better off in his care than he would have been in the “wild”.
The litany of 2000 years of Jewish woes at the hands of European Christians, eventuating in the horrors of the Holocaust are too well known to need any recounting here.
But the utter brutality of the Hindu caste system which permanently relegated a good part of the population of India to the status of non-humans over 3000 years, cannot be glossed over. The African Negro could be emancipated, but not so the “untouchable” of India. Buddha, Mahavira, Kabir, and Nanak, all tried to do this, but failed because the Brahmin proved stronger. He made caste a central tenet of Hinduism, a religion otherwise not shackled by orthodoxy. In this “Karma” would determine when “Moshka” would be achieved, and “Moshka was the only liberation from “samsara”, the eternal cycle of rebirth. And so when Gandhi preached humanity for the “bhangis” of India, those poor unfortunates condemned to dispose off the rich man’s waste, he could not dare advocate the end of the caste system. That would have brought down the concepts of Karma, Samsara, and Moshka, so central to Hindu belief that it would have brought down Hinduism itself. And so the best Gandhi could do was to encourage the rich man to be kind to the Bhangis, and to exhort the Bhangis to clean the rich man’s waste with ever greater dedication. This would help them to be born into a higher status in his next life. There was no other way out for them! No lateral exit from their miserable existence, much less a vertical one.
This makes Hinduism exceptional. It is the only belief system which is founded on inequality and injustice. Without this, the crime of caste would not be possible.
And now we come to the Gaza Genocide and the insidious nature of Zionism which was needed to bring this about. The founding fathers of Israel, whether it was Jabotinsky on the extreme right or Ben Gurion on the left, all were agreed on one thing i.e. that the Palestinians would have to be ethnically cleansed. This was known to scholars in the West, and thus to their intelligence specialists as well. Therefore, from before Israel’s “independence” the killing of Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing, and their slow genocide has been an ongoing process for about a hundred years. And this process was made possible by the connivance of the US and UK, the most “civilized” and powerful states in the world. Gaza has merely served to open this up to our awareness of it.
Mass murder by bombardment is easy because there is an anonymity about its victims. Similar is the case with bringing death to Gazans through starvation and deprivation of water. Only the siege needs to be tightened and the pressure cooker would do the rest. But the actual agent of mass and fast-spreading death will be disease whose seeds have already been sown. And everyone knows this.
However, the virulence of Israeli cruelty can be seen in the infliction of individual injury: killing of women and kids by snipers taking refuge in a church; machine gunning ambulances carrying the wounded; execution of bound Gazans after pushing them in a ditch designated to become a mass grave; over-running by tanks of pregnant women making their way to a hospital for delivery; burying people alive by bulldozing them; withholding medicines so kids had to suffer amputations without anesthesia; and the introduction of a new form of desecration-the bulldozing of cemeteries to expose and fling out the dead either as whole bodies, or in parts.
But what puts Gaza among history’s greatest crimes against humanity are some unique features about it: it is the greatest such massacre since the Geneva Conventions formally recognized this crime; it is a crime which perpetrators hide, but in Gaza it is being committed after being boldly announced by its perpetrators; it is one being daily filmed in real time during the act of its commission; it is being openly abetted by the US, the strongest and most “civilized” country of the world, which can easily halt it by putting a stop to the supply of bombs needed by Israel to murder the Palestinians; it is being acquiesced in by the rest of the world’s “civilized” nations lying bunched up in a morally decrepit Europe; the plan is to ethnically cleanse or exterminate the entire Palestinian population and it is backed by 98% of the Israeli population, whereas in Nazi Germany a vast majority of the populace knew very little about the Holocaust!
Indeed, so blatant is the Israeli Genocide of Gaza that many decent folks are increasingly falling back to wondering if Hitler was not right after all– if he knew something that the rest of us did not!