Last Thursday, President Bush, speaking in the Capitol Rotunda to survivors of "The Holocaust," as part of the annual "Days of Remembrance," said Americans are "bound by conscience" to be sure that the lessons of the concentration camps outlast the living witnesses. Forgotten during the "Days of Remembrance" were all the other holocausts--two of which occurred within the United States, and others that are ongoing. 

"Hitlerism was a human catastrophe which, unfortunately, had a precedent in the policy applied over five centuries by the European colonialists to 'colored people,'" writes Roger Garaudy, French Deputy Speaker and Senator in "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics." "What Hitler did to white people, they did to the American Indians,...just as they did to the Africans, of which they deported between 10 and 20 million, which means that Africa was robbed of 100 to 200 million of its inhabitants since ten people had to be killed for one to be taken alive during capture by the slave-dealers." 

Norman G. Finkelstein, professor at the City University of New York, whose parents survived Nazi concentration camps while every other family member was exterminated, writes in "The Holocaust Industry" that "The number of scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000. Consider by comparison scholarship on the hecatomb in Congo. Between 1891 and 1911, some 10 million Africans perished in the course of Europe's exploitation of Congolese ivory and rubber resources. Yet, the first and only scholarly volume in English directly devoted to this topic was published two years ago." 

French author, Phillipe Delmas, writing in "The Rosy Future of War" says: "The same Europe that we are now trumpeting as a model of pacifism has been built by wars, down to the last stone....The two World Wars--only recently fought--caused 100,000,000 deaths including 60,000,000 civilians. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions caused at least 50,000,000 more deaths; actually, historians have recently revised this upward to 100,000,000. As for the 146 little wars since 1945, they have discreetly exterminated close to 30,000,000 people, three-quarters of them civilians, and most of them in the name of the world powers....China has endured Western colonialism, invasion by the Japanese, liberation, and successive Maoist revolution: all told, China has suffered an estimated 30,000,000 to 60,000,000 deaths." 

"The massacres we do not hear about," writes Peter Dale Scott in "U.S. Responsibility for the Slaughters," "at least at the time, are those for which the United States itself is responsible. This on-going, systematic suppression, from the Philippines in the 1950s to El Salvador in the 1980s, falsifies our understanding, not just of our own history, but of all managed atrocities throughout the world." 

Regardless of the cost in human lives, in Africa, in Iraq, and elsewhere, divide and rule remains the policy. 

Dr. Eric Herring, the Iraq sanctions specialist at Bristol University, says that US and British decision-makers have exploited popular humanitarian sentiment for the most cynical Realpolitik reasons. They have no desire for the Shi'ite majority to take control or for the Kurds to gain independence. Their policy is to keep them strong enough to cause trouble for Saddam Hussein while ensuring that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to keep repressing them. This is a direct descendant of British imperial policy from the First World War onwards [and is about the control] of Iraqi oil...Divide and rule was and is the policy." 

Dr. Robert Dickson Crane, co-founder of the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University, and Foreign Policy Advisor to President Richard Nixon from 1963 to 1968 writes: "The current tragedy [in Sudan] results from the deliberate colonialist policy of Great Britain more than a century ago to put two totally different peoples into one administrative unit in order to better carry out its policy of divide and conquer....From my own proprietary knowledge as a government official, I know that the Israeli Mossad has tried to orchestrate the war between the south and the north, and the CIA has funded it, for more than thirty years. The objective is to pit black Africa against Arab Africa and thereby reduce the Arab, and now the Muslim, threat to Israel." 

Until recently, "the Nazi holocaust barely figured in American life," says Prof. Finkelstein. "Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war....it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life....[since then] it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for those policies." 

Prof. Finkelstein sees the federally funded Holocaust museum on the Washington Mall as "incongruous." "Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy here," he says, "were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans."

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Copyright 2001 The Wisdom Fund. Enver Masud is the director of The Wisdom Fund.  You can visit their Web site at http://www.twf.org.