a little game of “what if?”

by Shane Nicholson

Published: May 13, 2008

I’m not what I would call a conspiracy theorist; in fact, I tend to believe I’m a bit too realistic than my own idealist principles should allow. That said, I can’t help but look at the two massive natural disasters that have recently struck Asia and wonder, how many people actually died in these horrible events? I have no doubt the death toll is incredible, but I have even less doubt that leaders of both nations struck by these catastrophes would take any opportunity to make their backlog of unaccounted-for deaths a little bit smaller.

Sound nuts? Maybe. It took me a few minutes to work through the whole idea over after it first popped into my head and convince myself it wasn’t stone cold crazy. But I think we should acknowledge that either country would take any opportunity to write off a few political murders, maybe re-label a mass grave or two as a final resting point for those tragically lost as a result of anything other than the hand and sword of an oppressive military regime.

As history has taught us time and again, such governments are certain to blame anyone but themselves for such atrocities. The Soviets quietly pinned their slaughter of at least 100,000 Polish POW’s in 1939 on the Nazis after the Germans turned on their supposed allies. Throughout the war and for years after, nearly all war crimes perpetrated by the Red Army were passed on to the defeated German state, and for a time with very little question.

The Ottoman Empire and the subsequent Republic of Turkey have blamed the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians on a policy of “relocation” and “deportation,” continually skirting the fact that those “policies” were originated and enforced by their government. To this date the country refuses to accept any culpability while citing a number of reasons for the massive death toll, including that nearly an entire ethnic group simply starved to death or that the Armenians were a pro-Russian group and their continued presence threatened the very stability of the country.

The simple denial of such egregious acts against its own citizens or those under its power has been the method of choice by any number of states. While the Holocaust continues to be the prime example to all of the horrors such a state provided the proper means can perpetrate history has given us far too many examples. From the destruction of Carthage by the Romans in the second century B.C. to the Spanish Inquisition, the half-century of apartheid rule in South Africa to the Tlatelolco Massacre, even the Native American genocide (or gradual elimination) carried out by our own government, these actions all have one thing in common: the presentation of excuses by the states committing the acts and the acceptance of the reasoning, however absurd, by outside parties.

China is widely regarded as one of if not the premier human rights concern of our time, yet nations across the world refuse to press the issue, instead accepting the fact that a few “political extremists” and “separatists” may have to pay the ultimate price to keep our trade avenues through Beijing open.

Myanmar has quietly (at least by comparison) kept a military regime in power for over four decades now. Free elections in 1990 proved that the people of the country didn’t feel the Burmese Way to Socialism was going quite the way they wanted. Overwhelmingly, they voted for the new National League of Democracy party. Of course, the reigning government squashed the results and continues to rule to this day, and, despite evidence pointing to the Burmese government pro-actively pursuing a course of slow extermination of various ethnic groups, the international community continues to turn a blind eye to the growing list of human rights violations endorsed by the government. At least that was the case until we realized they weren’t going to let our aide into the country immediately after the landfall of and destruction laid by Cyclone Nargis, as major news outlets the world over collectively raised eyebrows and U.S. government officials at all levels suddenly woke up to the fact that there just may be worse countries out there than on that island 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

And while BBC reports from China are calling this “one of the most open and speedy responses to an emergency” following Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in southwestern Sichuan province, I’m left to wonder what would stop these two countries - both with governments that have openly flaunted their willingness to silence political dissidents, that have turned their respective militaries on monks within the last year - from hiding a few past crimes against its citizenry in the death tolls of the disasters we’ve seen unfold over the past two weeks.

I have to think that with the ease they’ve been allowed to go down such paths in the past that at the very least the thought has crossed their minds, and at the very worst the numbers we’ve seen already reflect the horrible fact that these two modern totalitarian regimes have no qualms toward the continued persecution of their own citizens.

—

(email this article or post to social network)

—