Moral Responsibility And Genocide

As corny as it may sound, beloved Uncle Ben from Stan Lee's famous comic book superhero "Spider-Man" may have said it best when he told a young Peter Parker "With Great Power, comes great responsibility."

I hate to sound corny if I can avoid it if at all possible, but it's the truth. I don't pretend to support war, killing, death, etc. Life is sacred. That's a universal truth, and it transcends all boundaries including age, mental development, gender, skin color, sexual preference, faith, and nationality. Thousands of times in history's grand panorama, power has been misused and people have been downtrodden. At times, those oppressed were driven into extinction. The persecution and wholesale slaughter of a group of people defined by any common thread is genocide. We define genocide as wiping out a race, but what is a race? Hebrews? Africans? Arabs? Indians? Orientals? Europeans? Slavs? Balkans? They're all races, yet are made up of different groups. Some from specific countries, some from specific geographical regions, some having a certain skin pigmentation or other phenotype that sets them apart from other people who aren't like them. Yet others still are bound by economic class or faith. The systematic attack and extermination of any group of people can thus be considered genocide.

So why do we pick and choose who we save from this crime?

Hitler and his allies rounded up Jews, Catholics, Homosexuals, Gypsies, and anyone who didn't fit their perfect ideal for a human being an sent them to Dachau and Auschwitz. The Ottoman Turks attempted to wipe out the Armenians living in Northern Turkey a few decades earlier. Slobodan Milosevic waged an ethnic war against Albanians in the Balkans. In Russia under Stalin, estimates have gone as high as five million people killed in class warfare known as 'De-Kulakization'. In Northern Iraq the Kurds faced genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Every day in Africa tribal groups live under the threat of warlords trying to wipe them off the pages of history. There are other instances, such as the Chinese cleansing of Tibetans and Buddhists near the border of Tibet and China, but these aforementioned examples are some of the more major ones.

Hearkening back to good old Uncle Ben, we are the USA, the leaders of the Western World in many respects. Europe hasn't acted internationally too many times without the United States' lead since the end of World War II. We have the power in the palm of our hands to stop injustice by rallying the greatest governments in our modern world and stopping crimes against humanity, but we hesitate.

It took Pearl Harbor to get us involved in World War II. Yet FDR knew exactly what Hitler was doing and what was going on at Auschwitz and Dachau and other camps. Hell, Henry Ford even gave Hitler $20 million dollars to carry out his Final Solution. Around that same time, Communism wore the mask of Father Stalin in Russia and exterminated 'wealthy' farmers in Soviet Russia. Yet there we ignored it completely, choosing instead the route that led to a cold war. Cuba under Fidel Castro in 1958 made pleas to the United States for help after he and his revolutionaries kicked out the extraordinarily corrupt government that was tied directly to the American Chicago mafia. People died in each of these instances, yet America did nothing. Why?

Now in our modern world we've raced in with UN and NATO backing to stop genocide against the Albanians and arrest Milosevic. As the horrors of these former genocides and economic cleansing came to light, we became determined and vigilant to stop it. The eagle spread its wings and became watchful. Yet since Hussein was put into office in 1979, he'd been waging a war of genocide. And we continued to let him, until recently in 2003 when the US-led Coalition forces attacked Iraq. Even then, the reason for going into Iraq wasn't to stop that genocide, it just happened to be a by-product.

The Western World has a moral obligation... We have the power. We have the moral obligation to put it to use to stop the horrors and atrocities being committed against people all over the world. We cannot and must not afford ourselves the base luxury of being racist to choose which people we will defend. And do not believe the newspapers and TV news which would have you believe that our forces are not welcome in these genocidal conflicts.

Working in the auto industry I have had an opportunity to meet a very diverse group of people. One of which was an Iraqi American who owns a car lot here in the State of Florida. His family including his 8 brothers and sisters were, at the time of the invasion, still living in Iraq. We always wondered how he felt about the goings on in Iraq, until one day a friend of mine and I spoke with him. We asked how he felt and he had tears in his eyes. He said he had been up for days on end waiting to hear from his family, and had just heard from them. They managed to escape to nearby Jordan and contact him to tell him that they were all right after the Republican Guard had set up their positions within Baghdad itself and the Coalition soldiers had to fight street to street among civilians to stop the remnant Iraqi army still loyal to Saddam. He asked us if we could tell him why it took America so long to come over there. He came to America because he loved this country and our way of life. He was only grateful when America invaded Iraq because it provided an opportunity for his family to experience freedom from tyranny and freedom from annihilation under a dictatorship.

Ladies and Gentlemen, here in the United States we have a wonderful document that contains the words, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'

Well ladies and gentlemen, those words do not just pertain to Americans. We have the moral responsibility to ensure that those inalienable Rights are applied equally to ALL men. The very declaration of our independence. The statement that men fought and died for. That ideal, is what is at the core of the American identity, and guess what? It is a universal identity. I've heard people say throughout my time on this earth that we don't have a right or any business messing in other countries, or that we shouldn't send troops abroad to meddle in the affairs of other nations.

We have a great power here in the United States. The power to sow hope and reap a harvest of prosperity by application of diplomacy, force, and justice with the global community, or the power to sit back and allow hate to prosper and fester. We have an obligation to use it for the betterment of humanity and the world around us. We have an obligation to leave the world better than we found it.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse." - John Stuart Mill