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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDare we call it genocide?
In 1932-33, after plans for collectivization of farms in the Ukrainian SSR failed, residents were faced with a major grain shortage and hunger began to consume the people. However, instead of seeking to assist his people, Soviet Leader Josef Stalin--who found the Ukrainian people to be ungrateful towards Moscow and was highly suspicious of their motives--deliberately withheld food and supplies from the area.
As a result, a great famine enveloped Soviet Ukraine. Conservative estimates have over 3 million people starving to death; others have the death toll even higher. Besides starvation, disease and cannibalism were rampant. Stalin's intentional famine and act of collective punishment against the Ukrainian people became known as the Holodomor.
Fast forward to 2017, where Category 5 Hurricane Maria hits the US commonwealth of Puerto Rico. As president, Donald Trump is hesitant to visit the stricken island. Finally, several weeks later he visits; once on the ground, he attacks the island's government for its debt, minimizes the situation by claiming that it "wasn't a real catastrophe like Katrina", and infamously chucks rolls of paper towels at a relief center as if he's an eight year old shooting baskets at his local Chuck E. Cheese.
Despite all this, he's quick to pat himself on the back, tweeting the following:
Link to tweet
Donald J. Trump?Verified account @realDonaldTrump
Nobody could have done what Ive done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!
4:37 PM - 8 Oct 2017
Despite lauding himself for his efforts, Trump decides to remind the people (the majority still without power and clean water at this time) of Puerto Rico that assistance is not a certainty. He tweets the following:
Link to tweet
Link to tweet
Link to tweet
Donald J. Trump
✔ @realDonaldTrump
"Puerto Rico survived the Hurricanes, now a financial crisis looms largely of their own making." says Sharyl Attkisson. A total lack of.....accountability say the Governor. Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes. Congress to decide how much to spend....We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!
7:07 AM - Oct 12, 2017
On October 9, 2017, he lets the temporary waiver of the Jones Act expire, which hampers relief efforts; his initial decision to waive the Jones Act in the first place was delayed compared to other disasters. Some of the contractors sent to the island are highly suspect, such as Whitefish Energy, a company given $300 million by the government and charged with restoring a portion of the power grid. The company had a grand total of two employees and just so happened to come from the same small Montana town as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The hospital ship USNS Comfort took weeks to arrive at Puerto Rico's shores and was sent back to the US mainland almost as soon as it arrived; when it was tethered off shore it saw approximately 6 patients a day. Food supplies were cut off at the end of January 2018, but not before it was reported that many of the supplies being shipped to the island were spoiled and useless.
Now, a Harvard University study has estimated the death toll of deaths that could be attributed to Hurricane Maria in the tumultuous three months that followed the storm was around 4,600, far more than the official death toll of 64.
The best case scenario for the Trump government was that this was simply gross incompetence on its part. But given Trump's cold, vindictive and absolutely non-empathetic attitude towards Puerto Rico, and considering the inexcusable level of corruption and neglect in the government response, should we consider the horrifying possibility that this was an act of genocide targeting the Puerto Rican people?
And no, 4,600 deaths is not the same as the 3 million plus that died in the Holodomor, or the 6 million to 12 million plus that died in the Holocaust, or the 1.5 to 3 million who died in the Cambodian genocide, but we have a tendency to compare our own actions to the very worst and dismiss it just because it doesn't match the scope of the very worst, even if it does match the spirit.
And, as the Holodomor shows, not all genocides are highly militarized events with killing fields or extermination camps; genocides can just as well take place when a people is collectively targeted and punished via means of intentional neglect.
So dare we take the step and consider whether what happened in Puerto Rico wasn't just a bungling act of mismanagement, but rather an intentional act of genocide by the Trump government?
Sophia4
(3,515 posts)Tommy_Carcetti
(43,181 posts)In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a "depraved indifference" to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. In a depraved-heart murder, defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person. If the risk of death or bodily harm is great enough, ignoring it demonstrates a "depraved indifference" to human life and the resulting death is considered to have been committed with malice aforethought.[1][2] In some states, depraved-heart killings constitute second-degree murder,[3] while in others, the act would be charged with varying degrees of manslaughter.[4]
Sophia4
(3,515 posts)Zoonart
(11,862 posts)benign neglect. The Rethugs ave been practicing this on the populace of color... the infrastructure... education...you name it, for over fifty years.
It has just now come "out of the closet", so to speak , because of this monster and his criminal cabal who no longer give a shit if it appears to be "benign" at all. Now it is CRIMINAL NEGLECT of everything and everyone who does not put money into his pocket.
Pretend to give a shit and then walk away has been the Rethug policy for decades.
The acceptance of benign neglect is what makes genocide possible. That is where we are headed.
Tommy_Carcetti
(43,181 posts)
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
YessirAtsaFact
(2,064 posts)And it was racially motivated. It was because they arent Anglos.
If they were English speaking with Northern European heritage, they would have been provided the same level of assistance as Houston and Florida.
As it was, OrangeTurd threw some paper towels, provided graft money to some favored companies and turned his back on PR.
Orsino
(37,428 posts)By definition it's the accumulation of resources in the hands of the few. The deprived become inconvenient, and every fascist dreams of simply disposing of some segment of the population, thinking that everything will be better without those people. They don't imagine that one day they too will be numbered among them.