The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA's Cold War Triumph (Austin Murphy)

The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA's Cold War Triumph
Author	Austin Murphy
Publisher	European Press Academic Publishing
First published	2000 Fucecchio
Type	Book
PDF	PDF

Preface

The Triumph of Evil represents a wake-up call to the world. Barraged by the most effective propaganda machine in history, I myself long believed at least partially in the make-believe world reported by the mainstream press and the USA establishment. However, having experienced the opening of the Berlin Wall first hand, I began to learn (as explained in the prelude to this book) that the stories told in the Western media often greatly distort the true reality of events. Having subsequently further researched the facts, I now feel an obligation to cite them for those who also wish to wake up to The Reality of the USA s Cold War Victory.

To begin, using a very objective measure of analysis, the Introduction to this book documents the fact that the USA is the most evil nation in history. In particular, the USA has deliberately killed more unarmed innocent civilians than any other country in the world (including even more than Nazi Germany). This conclusion is consistent with the main body of the book, which clearly shows that the "bad guys" won the Cold War.

Chapter 1 conclusively demonstrates the fact that the USA propaganda about the evils of communism is largely either greatly exaggerated or pure myth. In fact, communism represents a very good alternative to the very horrible USA capitalist system, as communist countries are not only more benevolent but also economically more efficient.

Communist countries were poor relative to the leading capitalist countries only because they were relatively much poorer before they became communist, and, despite exhibiting faster economic growth than capitalist countries, they had not caught up by 1 990.

Chapter 2 uses the case of the divided Germany to more exactly detail the relative advantages and disadvantages of communism and capitalism in practice. East and West Germany are ideal for a comparison

THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL

PREFACE

because the people and culture were very similar before the division with forced economic integration, and even with the East Germans'

into separate communist and capitalist countries after World War II.

natural desire for Western income levels. While the plan (which I cre

The findings show that communism is a superior system in virtually all ated in 1989 and presented to various leaders shortly after the opening respects. However, West Germany began with far greater income and of the Berlin Wall) has never been used in practice, economic analysis wealth than East Germany, and faster economic growth in East Gerindicates that it provides a viable means for countries to prosperously many had reduced this income disparity by the time of its demise in survive in a capitalist world (and actually offers a very positive alterna1990 but had not eliminated it. The higher incomes of West Germany tive to traditional forms of both capitalism and communism).

represented an extremely important attrac.tion by itself in making people Chapter 6 explains how the USA's Cold War victory has resulted prefer to live in West Germany. In addition, the relative poverty of in the world turning more and more toward free-market systems (i.e., East Germany also forced additional disadvantages on East Germans global capitalism). The defeat of the communist Soviet Union has not in terms of the government repression needed to prevent the richer and only created a very powerful propaganda tool for the USA and its capimuch more powerful West Germany from using capitalist economic talist system, but it has also removed the one world power that used warfare, propaganda, outright sabotage, and other activities to underto be able to challenge USA domination and counter USA threats. The mine the East German communist system.

USA's successful push toward a world market economy (via persua

Chapter 3 describes more details of the East German system that help sion and extortion) is shown to have led to widespread poverty and ecoclarify exactly how and why the communist system (despite its superinomic catastrophes, especially related to currency crises, and especially ority) was overthrown in 1989-90. Contrary to popular belief, East Gerin the newly capitalist countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern mans were not seeking to rid themselves of an undesirable system but, Europe. In addition, the economic disaster of the German unification instead, were revolting against their relative poverty.

itself is explained to have contributed to a chain of events that has fur

Continuing with the German case, Chapter 4 provides a detailed comther contributed to the worldwide economic crises.

parison of the economic efficiency of the communist and capitalist Chapter 7 concludes the book with a political analysis of USA world financial systems. While there are similarities, the communist financial domination after the Cold War. As indicated there, the atrocities of the system is shown to be more effective overall. Despite its superior effi

USA and the cruelty of the USA's capitalist system continue unabated.

ciency, East Germany was poorer than West Germany because it had The Triumph of Evil: the Reality of the USA s Cold War Victory is a had to pay an enormous amount of reparations to the Soviet Union after factual book that leads to one implication for action: overthrow the evil World War II. These reparations payments, which represented partial capitalist system by voting it out of power. In the hands of the people, compensation for all the damages inflicted on the Soviet Union by Nazi the facts will ensure that the Cold War victory for the USA and capital

Germany as a whole, had a value equal to several times East Germany's ism was only a temporary one, and that justice will eventually prevail annual output. West Germany, on the other hand, was not only spared via the ballot box.

from having to make such payments, but it also received substantial.

financial aid from the richer USA (which had been untouched by World War II). While the greater financial and economic efficiency of the East German system allowed it to partially catch up for the huge difference in incomes that existed in the two countries at their founding in 1949, it was not able to fully overtake West Germany by 1989.

Chapter 5 details an economic plan for how East Germany could have survived and prospered, even with the opening of the Berlin Wall, even

Prelude: "Better Rich and Healthy..."

Previous to experiencing the revolutionary events surrounding the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989-90, I must also admit to having largely believed in the great USA propaganda story about how wonderful capitalism is compared to communist societies. However, one ofthe first things I learned in my visits to East Germany was that it was different from the roboticized, repressed, cold, and stoical stereotyping of communist East Germany which I had been led to believe by Western media to be the truth.

An early clue to the actual facts of the East German people and culture occurred during my first visit there on May 1 , 1988. In particular, on that festive holiday in East Berlin, I found a kiosk which sold an assortment of interesting items, including stickers with the printed statement "Lieber reich und gesund als arm und krank," which translated to "Better rich and healthy than poor and sick." Astounded at such a sign that seemed to advocate striving for riches in the relatively poor (compared to the West) and reputedly repressive communist country, I asked the kiosk saleswoman if such statements were permitted in East Germany. After some discussion with her colleagues, she explained that the sticker had been designed as a counter to the Western slogan that one had to choose between being either rich and sick, or poor and healthy. After all, why not have the best of all possible worlds, which was what East Germany was trying to develop. Little did I realize at the time that East Germans would soon be achieving access to Western riches far faster than they had ever believed possible, albeit at the price of having to endure the sickness ofWestern capitalism.

14

THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL

PRELUDE

15

To further illustrate my naivety at the time, I relate another episode everybody knew the jokes. When I asked whether it was East or West from Berlin that occurred about one year later in July 1989, just before Gennan friends, he said that he had heard it from East Germans, but the revolution in East Germany broke out. The event is very trivial, but that some of the jokes had probably been invented by the West Germans it does provide an indication of the biases that USA propaganda had put and been exported to East Germany. When I continued to express shock into my mind, as well as something about the actual situation in East at people being allowed to tell such jokes in East Germany, he assured Germany during the Cold War.

me it was OK to say what one wanted in East Germany, as long as one As part of my attempt to experience various aspects of East German wasn't trying to overthrow the government.

culture (and meet new and exciting people) in the early summer of Being on a research assignment in Berlin for the entire period from 1989, I visited a local group of the Free German Youth in East Berlin the summer of 1989 to the summer of 1990, I experienced first-hand that had advertised its disco party in an East German tour guide book.

(and participated in) what I believe to be one of the most incredible About 75% of all East German youth were members of the Free German revolutions in history. During that time, I learned much about the Cold Youth, but only those with some interest in or support of communist War, the USA, East Germany, communism, and capitalism from direct politics tended to be active in the events or disco parties of this East observations, discussions, and actions (my actions also apparently led German government organization. After conversing with several East the East German secret police to create a file on me in their counterintel

German teenagers at the disco for some time (during which they repeatligence department, which investigated foreigners suspected of engagedly emphasized that they dido 't want war, although I had never brought ing in espionage and subversion in East Germany).

up the subject), one teenager asked if I wanted to hear some good Although my initial interest and knowledge in the subject matter of jokes. After I answered positively, I was asked if I knew the difference this book grew out of first-hand experience, I have verified all informabetween neutron bombs and East German coffee. When I said I dido 't tion herein with published sources (and so I cite the relevant authors and know, he answered that he dido 't know either, since both mercilessly publication year in parenthesis in the text or footnotes of this book). I kill people without damaging coffee cups or other objects. When I, have also investigated contrary published allegations, but I have refuted being unaware of the poor quality of East German powder coffee, didn't the distorted opinions with facts. My experiences in 1989-90, combined laugh, the East German asked me another question. He wanted to know with subsequent events and research, have slowly woken me up to face what the difference was between the East o"erman government leaders the fact that my country (the USA) is the most evil one on the face of and terrorists. When I said I didn't know, he answered that terrorists the earth and in the history of mankind.

have supporters. Shocked by the anti-government overtone (in what I had been led by USA propaganda to believe was a police state), I didn't Laugh because I again wasn't even sure ifl understood the joke.

When he explained that the East German leaders were not too popular, I asked whether it was permitted to make such jokes in East Germany. He laughingly said that everybody did it. Then he asked me of what crime an East German was convicted of for calling the East German leader an idiot. When I indicated that I dido 't know, he told me it was for the crime of revealing a state secret. After he told me several more antigovernment jokes but still failed to generate even a smile from me, he said I dido 't have any sense of humor. When I asked where he had learned the jokes, he told me that he had heard it from friends and that

An Objective Analysis of Relative Position in the History of Deliberate Exterminations of Human Beings

I spellf 33 years and 4 months in active military service as part of this country :SO most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer. a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil illlerests in /914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central America republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in /909-19/2. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in /9/6./n China I helped to see that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I fee/ I could have given AI Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. We Marines operated on three continents. " -Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.), November 1935.

Most Americans learn in school, through the mainstream media, and from Hollywood that they are and have always been the "good guys" fighting evil villains (Schulz, 1982), as symbolized by John Wayne, or the recently deceased Roy Rogers in his old western movies (Rickey, 1998). Most Americans are made to believe that their system stands for democracy, freedom, human rights, and honest hard work in the pursuit of happiness within a capitalist framework, and they are led to see anyone who opposes their model system, especially communist as the "bad guys" (Zion, 1995). This attitude has resulted in the USA being internationally perceived by some to be the "capital of global arrogance" (Azad, 1998). Americans' attitudes (arrogant or otherwise) are heavily shaped by a press that has become increasingly concentrated under the control of just a few USA companies (Foerstel, 2000). Jensen (2000) has reported that six media firms now "control most of the world's information: Time Warner, Viacom/CBS, Disney, Bertelsmann, General Electric, and the News Corp." Even these few companies work together closely with each other in many joint ventures (McChesney, 2000). As stated by Phillips (2000), "Media is no longer a competitive industry but rather an oligopolic collective of like-minded rich, white, upper-class elites with shared agendas seeking to expand their power and influence globally. This concentrated media can easily manipulate (and censor) the information provided to the public to help it achieve its capitalist goals. For instance, in response to a question regarding the media's silence on a particular issue that would have portrayed corporate America in a negative light, one television station manager bluntly stated, "We paid $3 billion for these stations, and we have the right to make the news. The news is what we say it is" (Clark, 2000). ''The six largest U.S. firms accounted for more than 90 percent of U.S. theatre revenue," and "half a dozen major chains" rule "the roost" in the newspaper industry (McChesney, 2000). "More and more places are becoming 'one-paper' towns," and "radio is now dominated by a few mega-companies, each of which own hundreds of stations" (Jackson, 2000), while "U.S. book publishing is now dominated by seven firms, the music industry by five, cable TV by six," and "nearly all of these are now parts of vast media conglomerates" (McChesney, 2000). "The ownership and control of news media by an increasingly small and select group of business owners is bound to restrict the kinds of stories that get widely reported" (Lewis, 2000). One journalist put it more subtly, "If you know that they really don't want certain stories at the top, you're not going to do those kinds of stories" (Andersen, 2000). While there are small and alternative media organizations (Foerstel, 2000), their credibility is often marginalized, such as by comparing them with fantasy magazines like the National Enquirer if their views vary substantially from those of the mainstream giants, which thereby set the standards. Some of the big media/entertainment conglomerates have a significant amount of non-media commercial holdings (including in the armaments industry), and, in the interest of their own corporate profit maximization (as well as that of their rich corporate advertising clients), they have a natural pro-USA-capitalism (and even pro-war) bias (Foerstel, 2000). Also contributing to the media's pro-USA-capitalism prejudice is the fact that "the media corporations and the sponsoring corporations [i.e., the large corporate advertisers which effectively use their advertising expenditures to buy the media] are themselves tightly interlocked" (Jackson, 2000). The media's pro-USA bias is further reinforced by the heavy reliance of the press on USA government sources of information for their gathering and analysis of news, which can lead to extreme distortions in reporting to the public (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). In particular, with respect to international events, the mainstream media often just regurgitates stories created by tpe CIA for propaganda purposes (Goff, 2000). Saadawi (2000) concludes, "Never before in history has there been such domination of people's minds by the mass media .... How can we be free to choose if the media injects us day and night with false information?" While "tabloid" or ''yellow journalism" has long existed in the capitalist media to incite people to war and for other ends (such as to mobilize support for launching the War of 1898 against Spain), a form of capitalist journalism has developed in the USA and in Western countries that even more blatantly admits to being particularly biased and one-sided (Pirocanac, 2000). This new "journalism of attachment" is designed to provide a type of psychological "therapy" reporting which attempts to make the journalists and their readers feel good about themselves and their country regardless of the facts (Independent Commission of Inquiry, 1999). It represents the philosophy of "giving the people what they want" irrespective of factual information, or lack thereof (Schlechter, 2000). Since the advertisers who pay for television and other media are looking for audiences with money to spend, the "people" the press feel obligated to satisfy are those with more money, whose . very wealth naturally makes them right-wing anticommunists, and whom the media do not want to tum off with overly "liberal" reporting (Foerstel, 2000). There is thus no "market" for anti-USA and anti-capitalist facts and reports, and so capitalism naturally censors such information (Johnstone, 2000). Although the USA media often report some evil actions of the USA and its politicians, most of the attention is focused on relatively minor issues, such as sex scandals, which are said to represent exceptions that can be corrected with better human morals (Zion, 1995). The worst excesses are either ignored or distorted as a great triumph for the USA (Foerstel, 2000). However, as a result of the criticism on minor issues, the USA press is widely perceived as being objective and perhaps even overly critical (Herman and Chomsky, 1 988). In fact, the USA media covers politicians' personal lives and sexual behavior so extensively that attention is deflected from the terrible atrocities American political leaders have allowed the USA to commit (Foerstel, 2000). The possibility exists that even the USA leaders have been brainwashed by the media propaganda, which itself is so powerful that it often convinces even the propagandists themselves (Smith, 2000). The result is a classic case of denial, whereby people do not want to hear, investigate, or believe facts contrary to the "good" image created. For instance, within the context of comments about a "rediscovery of our values," the very popular President Ronald Reagan stated in January 1989 (a few years before he himself was afflicted with Alzheimer's related memory loss), "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are" (Greene, 1999). This statement was either incredibly naive (demonstrating extraordinary ignorance of how terrible we Americans really have been as a people), extremely cynical (in terms of deliberately attempting to help dupe us Americans into a false sense of pride in the terrorism committed by the USA), or subconsciously factual (that we won't even realize that we represent a mass murdering nation of zombies, unless we wake up to the historical facts and cure our nation's sickness). Even those who recognize that the USA has committed many crimes against humanity typically try to justify the USA's atrocities by asserting that the USA has not been as terrible as other countries. For instance, the USA media is often so successful in vilifying the USA's enemies (like the Serbs) that even many left-wing critics of the USA and its policies are fooled into supporting some atrocities such as the USA's deliberate bombings of civilian targets in Yugoslavia in 1 999 (Foerstel, 2000). Despite the propaganda barrage against the enemies of the USA, an investigation of the facts indicates that it is the USA which has been acting imperialistically and immorally, engaging in actions that are little different from the very evil policies employed by Adolf Hitler who also vilified and slaughtered masses of innocent people (Johnstone, 2000). In fact, a careful analysis of history and current affairs indicates that the USA has committed the worst atrocities in world history. A mere listing of the crimes committed by the USA in its history provides educational perspective on this issue, but an objective measure of atrocities is required in order to establish unbiased evidence on the subject. For this purpose, the estimated body count of unarmed innocent civilians deliberately killed by a country can be used to keep score. According to that numeric measure, the USA is indeed number 1, although it may be only slightly ahead ofNazi Germany and Spain. Other countries in the top ten are listed to provide perspective, as are a few other countries with a reputation for infamous atrocities.

Evidence on USA Atrocities

The USA has killed over ll million unarmed civilians in a long continuous history of engaging in massive extermination campaigns, terrorism, imperialism, and other atrocities. This history ranges from the genocide of native American Indians (and stealing of their land) to the enslavement of African blacks; from the imperialist invasion of Mexico in the first half of the 1800s (enabling the USA to seize more land from the Indians) to the War of 1898 that was launched to permit the USA to seize Spain's colonies; from the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively solidified the USA policy of controlling or colonizing the Western Hemisphere) to the frequent invasions of Latin American countries that have continued throughout the 1900s to ensure governments there remain largely under the control of the USA; from the terrorist aerial bombings of civilian targets that have killed millions of unarmed innocent civilians over the last 50+ years in places like Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, etc. (and maimed millions more) to the murder of millions of unarmed civilians by CIA-imposed dictators such as in Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, etc. (Zion, 1995). A more exact breakdown of the body count follows:

[table]

Although each of the foregoing extermination campaigns is fairly well documented in the listed references, the breadth and depth of the USA atrocities merit providing more details and perspective.

The USA's Beginning Genocide

To begin the analysis with the USA's first, longest, and largest mass murder, it is first necessary to estimate how many Indians were in what is now the USA before the arrival of the white invaders. This task is especially important because USA propaganda would have people believe that the USA was largely a vast unsettled wilderness (occupied by only a few "non peoples called savages") before the invasion of the whites (Jennings, 1975). Henige ( 1998) has provided an abundance of facts indicating overestimation of the original Indian populations in Central and South America, but the Indian population existing within the USA before the arrival of the Europeans has been widely underestimated by a very large amount for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Churchill, 1994). While the USA was originally estimated by many early observers to be populated with millions oflndians (Thornton, 1987), even these guesses may have been far too low (at least partially because they were lacking in documented analysis). Nevertheless, many successive researchers have discounted (instead of more appropriately raised) such prior estimates, resulting in a compounded reduction in the already low numbers that lack scientific justification and that are unquestionably far below the actual original level of the native American population (Churchill, 1994). There is a very important political purpose and personal nationalistic bias in reporting very low numbers. In particular, underestimating the original Indian population makes the USA seem almost vacant originally before white occupation, thereby creating the impression that the conquest of the territory was a "settlement" as opposed to an invasion and mass killing (Johansson, 1982). There was also an important legal reason for the extremely low bias in early Indian population estimates, as British colonial law only allowed settlers to seize vacant territory and did not permit the taking of land by force or fraud (Jaimes, 1992). Jennings ( 1975) has indicated that many of the low estimates of the original Indian population are based on "official" USA government sources, such as a Smithsonian Institute book listing numbers estimated "without specific documentation" by Mooney ( 1928). 1 The meaninglessness of such government estimates is easily illustrated by Mooney's count of only 25,000 Indians in all of New England in the early 1600s, when one tribe living in a small 800 square mile area of New England alone numbered over 30,000 at that time, and when there is documentation of other densely settled territories of New England (numbering as many as 100 Indians per square mile) as well (Jennings, 1975). Similarly, whereas Mooney ( 1928) estimated scarcely a million Indians for the entire USA, archaeological evidence indicates millions of Indians lived in the eastern end of the Ohio Valley alone (Jennings, 1975). Nevertheless, modem authors, even those sympathetic to the Indians like Brown ( 1970), often recite ridiculously low numbers based on the "official" USA count. Mooney's "official" ( 1928) book actually implies less than one Indian per square mile on the 3+ million square miles of the USA. Such a low estimate is obviously ludicrous when one considers that there was a well-documented one Indian on average per square mile in "one of the world's areas least hospitable to human habitation" in a Western Hemisphere desert (Dobyns, 1966). Even numbers below ten million Indians in the USA appear somewhat absurd in light of researchers estimating 8 million or more Indians on a single island (Hispaniola) in the Caribbean. (Thomson, 1998). A much more plausible estimate of the original North American Indian population is provided by Domenech ( 1860), an unbiased European, who traveled extensively among the native Americans, studied many reports of other travelers and researchers, provided an analysis of many of the hundreds of Indian tribes in the USA, and stated the number of Indians north of Mexico to have been 16- 17 million in the mid-seventeenth century. A similar estimate based on other data is provided by Sale ( 199 1 ), who estimated 15 million Indians north of Mexico. Churchill ( 1994) has stated the number of Indians living north ofMexico was most likely between 12.5 million and 18.5 million before the invasion by the whites. Because Canada was very sparsely settled by Indians (Thompson, 1966), originally with " four or five or more times" as many Indians in the USA as in Canada due to the existence of"four or five times" as much land suitable for agriculture (Jaffe, 1992), most of the 12.5- 18.5 million Indians north of Mexico lived in what is now the USA at the time of the white invasion. However, thousands fled subsequently to Canada (Brown, 1970), which developed a relatively benevolent relationship with the Indians (Daunton and Halper, 1999), to escape the USA's attacks (Jennings, 1993). Churchill's ( 1994) range of estimates is partially derived from the typically observed 90-99% "disappearance" rates for native populations in various areas of the Western Hemisphere cited by Dobyns ( 1966), who suggested assuming no more than a 98% elimination rate. With the low point for the number of Indians north of Mexico being 370,000 (of which 250,000 were in the USA) at the end of the nineteenth century (Thornton, 1987), a division by one minus the maximum recommended disappearance rate of .98 (i.e., a division by .02) indicates 18.5 million Indians. Using the 250,000 figure for the continuous 48 USA states alone in the calculation implies 12.5 million Indians there. However, it is virtually certain that far more than 12.5 million of the 18.5 million Indians were originally in the USA territory, since a large number of the modem Indians in Canada were descendants of refugees from the USA's imperialist policies (Jennings, 1993), and since the USA's genocidal policies (Churchill, 1994) surely made the survival rate for Indians in the USA much lower than in Canada. In any event, such population estimates based on average disappearance rates in various places observed in the Americas are very likely on the low side. In particular, there is substantial evidence (some of which is reported subsequently in this Introduction) that the USA had a deliberate extermination strategy that was far more effective and continuous than the Indian policies used by the other white invaders (Churchill, 1994). As a result, it is probable that the USA had a much higher elimination rate than the rest of the occupiers of Indian land (thus indicating an extermination rate over 98%, and there fore implying an Indian population in excess of 18.5 million north ofMexico). Thompson ( 1966) has recommended an alternative method of estimating the original Indian population as the number that could exist on the land given the technology and resources (assuming the population would stabilize at that level). While Dobyns ( 1966) has indicated that only 2 million square miles in the USA were ''fit for Indian habitation, Kroeber ( 19 39) has estimated over 150 Indians per square mile on various large tracks of hospitable inland and coastal USA territory. Extrapolating those figures implies that the USA could have potentially supported over { 150x2 million}=300 million Indians if it were everywhere as densely settled as in the most populated areas. However, although about half of the 2 million square miles of hospitable USA territory were fertile river valleys (Dobyns, 1983), not all hospitable areas of the USA could have supported 150 Indians per square mile. For instance, Thomas ( 1976) provides widespread evidence of typical crop yields for Indians in the USA that were high enough to maintain populations as dense as 90 people per square mile on typically hospitable land, even after allowing for sizable fields left uncultivated for decades to permit soil rejuvenation (and some hunting). The latter, more realistic figure implies that the USA could have supported as many as 180 million Indians. A more conservative estimate is implied by Dobyns ( 1983), who has cited a study indicating that fifteenth century North American Indian farming methods could have supported between 10 and 25 Indians per square kilometer of average hospitable territory (or over 20-50 per square mile). One reason for using Dobyns's lower figures is that many Indians also engaged in a significant amount of hunting and fishing, in addition to farming, and those activities tended to use up more territory than pure farming (Thomas, 1976). Dobyns ( 1976) has cited one estimate of 5 purely hunter-gatherers per square mile of mountainous territory in the U SA and 10 per square mile for hunter-gatherer-fishers, but he also cites another estimate ( from a nineteenth century researcher) of 50 Indian hunter-gatherers-fishers per square mile over a large 25,000 square mile stretch of California territory. Using the more conservative former numbers , Thompson's ( 1966) methodology would imply only 10-20 million Indians on the 2 million square miles of hospitable territory in the U SA if no Indians were farmers. Because most Indians were engaged in agriculture as well as hunting and fishing (Dobyns, 1983), the number of Indians per square mile would actually be between 5 and 90. Thus, the estimate of 20-50 Indians per square mile is very feasible, implying 40-100 million Indians on the two million hospitable square miles of the U SA. While even these lower figures may seem high compared to the ridiculously low estimates put out by the USA government, an Indian population density of 20-50 per square mile is comparable to that of less populated areas of Europe in the same era. In particular, the number of people per square mile (of combined hospitable or inhospitable land) in Europe ranged between 1 0 and 100 in different countries in the late fourteenth century (well be fore Columbus "discovered" America), even though the bubonic plague had just wiped out 1/3 of the European population at that time (Hobhouse, 1989). Given that less efficient crops were planted in Europe than what the Indians historically planted in what is now the USA (Thomas, 1976), given that Europe had less fertile soil and a more inhospitable climate in many places than the hospitable areas of the USA ( Hobhouse, 1989), and given that people also engaged in an extensive amount of hunting in Europe (Sale, 199 1 ), there is no reason to believe that Indian population densities should be substantially lower than the range of European ones. In fact, detailed empirical research provides widespread evidence that Indians in the U SA could indeed subsist on similar acreage (and therefore with similar population density) as Europeans, and they could do so with less ground preparation and mechanization because of their heavy use of efficient crops like com (Thomas, 1976).2 In addition, since Indian lifespans in many parts of the USA have been found to be similar to those in Europe at the time (Thornton, 1987), it is very likely that they could h ave grown to a similar population density. Moreover, it should also be mentioned that a population density of 20-50 Indians per square mile is far less than the 125 Indians per square mile estimated to have originally existed in the 200,000 square miles of Central Mexico where farming technology was no more advanced than that used at the time by Indians in what is now the USA (Borah and Cook, 1969). An estimate of 20-50 Indians per square mile for the U SA is also substantially lower than estimated for many other parts of Central and South America (Denevan, 1976). It should be emph asized that the estimate of 40-100 million Indians on the hospitable territory of the U SA ignores the Indians on the 1,000,000 square miles of desert in the 48 mainland USA states (MacLeod, 1928), as well as those native Americans in Alaska and Hawaii. Given th at there were some Indians who lived in even the extremely arid USA deserts (Domenech, 1860), and given th at Hawaii was home to hundreds of thousands aborigines (Larsen, 1994 ), 90% of whom were also exterminated by the USA invaders (Jennings, 1975), the latter numbers may not be trivial. Another estimate of the original Indian population in the USA can be obtained from actual sightings of Indians by settlers. For instance, after the Europeans had unsuccessfully tried to colonize Virginia in the sixteenth century (Dobyns, 1 976b), a second white invasion of the territory led a Virginia colony secretary to make notes in 16 12 indicating 0.7 Indian warriors observed per square mile on hospitable land (MacLeod, 1928). However, Dobyns ( 1966) mentions th at many potential warriors (or young adult males) may never have been seen because they died from disease or retreated further inland before being sighted in battle formation. In addition, since many Indian warriors may have engaged in guerrilla warfare instead of deliberately forming into mass countable groups th at could be decimated by the white invaders' superior firepower ( Jennings , 1 975), many more warriors may not have been counted. The number of unobserved young adult Indian males could have been especially large in Virginia, since Indians in the southeastern states of the USA were less likely to be organized into tribes that would send warriors out to face settlers and soldiers (Hobbouse, 1989). Even the large organized tribes of Virginia "avoided out-in-the-open battles," and retreat was often their only option for escaping from the deadly settlers (Sale, 199 1 ). Moreover, even for Indian tribes that did fight, military se rvice itself was voluntary, and so not all young Indian males were warriors (Novack, 1972). Assuming th at 50-90% of the young Indian males may have died or retreated inland before being observed in massed battle formation, there would be between 1 .4 to 7 young adult males per square mile. Assuming 4 Indians per young adult male as in some overly conservative prior research (Denevan, 1 976), that implies 5.6 to 28 Indians per square. Given two million square miles of hospitable land in the USA (Dobyns, 1 966), there would be between 11.2 million and 56 million Indians in what is now the USA. Since there is evidence that there were actually five (Dobyns, 1 983) or six (Denevan, 1996) Indians per young adult male (as opposed to the four assumed in the calculations), and sometimes as many as twelve (Domenech, 1 860), these figures could rationally be increased by 25-50% or more (to at least 1 5-70 million Indians in the continental USA). Dobyns (1983) has provided more detailed data indicating there were actually 1 1 .2-1 2.5 Indians per warrior, as not all young males were available to fight on the front lines, and because there were numerous older and younger male Indians as well as females. Such a higher multiplier seems especially plausible if the multiplier itself is to incorporate the information provided in the previous paragraph about not all warriors being observed. Using the lower end of the 1 1 .2-12.5 range, the Virginia sightings of 0. 7 warriors per square mile therefore imply 7.8 Indians per square mile, or 1 5.6 million Indians extrapolated to all 2 million hospitable square miles of the continental USA. This figure should be increased somewhat to allow for the Indians on inhospitable lands in the continental USA, as well as on land in Hawaii and Alaska. Moreover, given that Virginia (the basis for the extrapolated estimates) was probably less densely settled than other areas like New England (Hob house, 1989), it is certainly possible that the number of Indians in what is now the USA originally far exceeded 16 million. Dobyns ( 1983) actually cites estimates of over 10 Indians per square mile in Virginia and over 30 Indians per square mile in New England. These figures imply 20-60 million Indians in the USA if the other of the 2 million square miles of hospitable land in the USA were equally densely settled. While MacLeod ( 1928) has estimated that only 1 .5 million square miles of the USA were originally inhabited by the Indians, largcly because of an assumption that the mountains and vast Midwestern prairie lands were not cultivated by them, this hypothesis appears to be in error. In particular, some of the mountains of the USA may have been occupied with as many as 5 Indians per square mile (Dobyns, l976a), and archaeological evidence indicates that there were originally a large number of actual Indian towns on the Midwestern prairies (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1925) and that the Indians on those prairies were originally farmers who existed on diets heavy in com (Larsen, 1994). Regardless, even making the false assumption that the prairies and mountains were totally vacant, the numbers still indicate at least 15-45 million Indians in the USA. Thus, it is pretty clear that there were originally far more than 10 million Indians in what is now the continental USA, as recent scholarly estimates indicate (White, 1995). By the mid-nineteenth century, Domenech ( 1 860), an unbiased French observer (whose own travels as well as his study of other Indian voyageurs led him to believe that the USA government estimates for the Indian population to be only � of the true total at the time), estimated the number of Indians in the USA to have fallen to between one and two million (as he reported that the "greater part" of the hundreds of Indian tribes had disappeared or were "almost extinct" by 1 860). By the time most Indians had been rounded up and sentenced to desert reservations in 1 890 (or forced to flee into Mexico or Canada), their number in the continental USA had dropped further to only 250,000 {Thornton, 1987). Even after having well over 95% of their population eliminated by the tum of the century, the Indians still had to endure several more decades in their desert concentration camps. In the meantime, most of the remaining Indian children were separated from their parents so that American Christianity could be taught to them without "pagan" parent influence, and only afterwards were they finally granted USA citizenship and allowed to leave their reservations (Churchill, 1 994). Even after citizenship had been granted, the Indians remained poor, since the few resources on their desert reservations were often given to the "nonIndians" (who alone had sufficient capital to exploit them), and since, outside the reservations, "those few [Indians] who do obtain employment paying a decent wage or salary are often expected to act like whites if they expect to be promoted or retained" (Meister, 1976). The disappearance of the native Americans in the USA cannot be attributable to assimilation into white society, as marriage and association with Indians was generally frowned upon religiously and socially until the twentieth century (Jennings, 1 993) and was even illegal ins ome areas of the USA (Waters, 1977). However, many of the remaining 250,000 Indians of the USA at the end of the nineteenth century were of mixed race (Dobyns, 1983), as temporary sexual relationships had frequently developed out of contacts with white traders (McCracken, 1959). While granting Indians citizenship in the twentieth century has increased their assimilation into the overall USA society to the point where the number of people with some partial Indian ancestry has risen to about 10 million (or less than 5% of the USA population), the number of people in the USA with some partial Indian ancestry outside the reservations was only a few hundred thousand in 1900 (Johansson, 1982). The latter figure represents about 1% of the overall combined 76 million Indians and non-Indians living in the USA in 1900 ( World Almanac, 1998), and represents substantially Jess than 10% of the original Indian population before the invasion of the whites. These numbers stand in sharp contrast with those of neighboring Mexico, which immediately granted citizenship to Indians upon its founding (Jennings, 1993), and which today has a population that is 90% at least part-Indian (compared to only 4% of the USA population having any Indian heritage) and that includes about 30 million pure Indians (U.S. News & World Report, 1993). While a significant portion of the Indians in the USA may have died out because of diseases spread by the invading whites, researchers such as Meister ( 1976) have documented the fact that it wasn't the contact with the whites but the brutal practices of the white invaders (such as removing Indians from their land, food, and water sources) that led to the high Indian death rate from disease (and that led to the virtual extermination of the Indians in the USA). Domenech ( 1860) has explained that Indians actually increased their population over time when allowed to live stationarily in peace in a fertile area, but that migrations forced upon them by the USA destroyed their morale, frequently drove them to alcohol, and weakened their ability to resist disease. Regardless, while a severe epidemic or widespread outbreak of disease might temporarily drop a population level by a third under normal conditions (Hobhouse, 1989), it took an invasion and outright genocidal policies to virtually exterminate the Indians (Thornton, 1997). In addition, although many Indians may have died in intertribal battles (Thornton, 1987}, such fighting had been fairly minimal until the whites employed military force to push Indians tribes ever farther westward into other Indian tribes' territories (Jennings, 1975, 1993). Assuming at a minimum the lower end of the range of Churchill's (1994) possibly very low estimates (i.e., 12.5 million) for the number of Indians originally being in what is now the USA, assuming one half of the Indians in the USA were killed by or intermarried with the Spanish and others who had occupied parts of what is now the USA for a time (such as in Florida and the Southwest), assuming an extremely high estimate of 500,000 Indian warriors were killed while engaged in battle with armed forces (Thornton, 1987), assuming a half million Indians in the USA fled to Canada or Mexico, and assuming normal population growth of 0% (due to the disease, hunger, and dislocation caused by the white invasion potentially reducing the Indian birth rate to the level of the normal death rate), one arrives at an extremely conservative estimate of 5 million Indian noncombatants killed by the USA. However, given that there were likely far more than 12.5 million Indians originally living in what is now the USA, given that the rate at which the Spanish and others killed or married Indians was only a small fraction of the USA extermination rate (Cook, 1943), and given that the Spanish and others occupied only a portion of the USA and only for a time, it is likely that the number of Indians killed by the USA far exceeds 5 million (and is probably greater than 10 million, although only the absolute minimum figures are included in the conservative Table 1 count). The European "settlers" in the USA had been involved in the slaughtering of Indians at least since their invasions at Roanoake in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620 (Churchill, 1994). Although Britain advised the settlers to pay for the land they seized, such a requirement was virtually impossible to enforce (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990), especially since the colony states had been made fairly autonomous (Osgood, 1957). Even when local British military forces formally forbade settlers from invading Indian territories (in an attempt to keep the peace with the Indians), enforcement was very difficult without more troops and more formal British laws (Downes, 1940). As a result, until 1763, the settlers were abl� to freely steal from the Indians and kill any of them who got in the way, and, even in instances of actual settler purchases of land from the native Americans, fraud was normally involved (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990).3 Within such an environment, fighting naturally broke out frequently (Utley and Washburn, 1985). In an attempt to help protect both themselves and their land from the invading American settlers, many Indians allied themselves with the French in various wars, as well as politically with Britain in some of the continuous disputes over settlers stealing Indian property (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990). Finally, Britain, which sought to exploit the Indians via trade as opposed to land theft (Jaimes, 1992), established in 1763 a blanket proclamation that formally forbade American settlers from stealing more land from the Indians, setting a boundary at the Allegheny mountains (Smith, 2000). While frontiersmen like George Washington saw the proclamation as a "temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," and while there were numerous attempted breaches of this law (including an outright military invasion of Indian territory by Virginia militia in 1774), the Indians (with some British encouragement in the complex political environment) had some success in en forcing the proclamation (Downes, 1940). In fact, the 1763 legal infringement on settlers ' "right" to steal Indian lands was one of the primary motivating factors in the American settlers ' revolution from British rule 12 years later (Novack, 1972), although important tax and trade issues were also involved in the conflict (Smith, 2000). Most Indians quite naturally sided with the British against the USA in the American Revolutionary War (which lasted until at least 1782 west of the Allegheny mountains), as, despite some French political assistance later in the war, USA attempts to win Indian neutrality with treaties promising to steal no more Indian land and to engage in friendly trade (through which the Indians hoped to obtain the weapons needed to defend against settler encroachments. on their land) were foiled by continued USA settler invasions of Indian territory and by the USA's failure to pay for goods traded with the Indians (Downes, 1940). After the USA victory over Britain, the white American settlers were "freed" from British legislation prohibiting the theft of more land from the native Americans. As a result, it became possible for more USA territories and states to be created out of further areas stolen from the Indians. The USA initially claimed all Indian territory as its own, arrogantly announced that the Indians as a whole had no rights whatsoever to their own land, and offered the Indian nations the choice of various small reservations under USA dominion or the "destruction" of their ''women and children" (Downes, 1940). However, USA military invasions of Indian territory were initially defeated in the early 1790s, and so the USA resorted thereafter to using local military superiority to force individual Indian tribes/nations to enter into treaties to· give up a portion of their land in return for the USA agreeing to stop its attacks (Jennings, 1993). Such treaties were similar to those entered into by the USA in the 1775-1782 war (Downes, 1940), although this pacification strategy was not completely successful in holding all Indian military forces at bay in the American Revolutionary war or in subsequent conflicts such as in the War of 18 12 (Utley and Washburn, 1985). The USA pacification treaties with the Indians were substantially different from those typically entered into earlier by the European colonial powers. In particular, the European colonists had generally engaged in treaties with Indians merely in order to form alliances with them to promote trade, although it is true that allied Indians were often encouraged to fight other tribes who were cooperating with competing European powers (Jennings, 1975). In contrast, the USA's strategy was to use each successive treaty to "keep the natives quiet" on the frontier until the newest conquered possessions could be fully absorbed and "resources could be mustered and organized" to allow armed settlers and soldiers to invade other Indian territories that the USA had guaranteed by treaty not to seize (Jennings, 1993). Grinde ( 1975) provides an illustrative case study whereby settlers in the 1800s invaded Cherokee land guaranteed by federal treaty and engaged in widespread killing of lndians there, but Federal officials generally allowed such behavior, legally asserting in the Cherokee case that the Federal treaties were overridden by local government rights (such as that of the state of Georgia here) which invariably sided with the settlers and left the Indians with no rights. USA purchases of land from European powers, as well as the USA's seizure of territory from Mexico in an imperialist war that the USA launched in the middle of the nineteenth century (Zinn, 1995), enabled the USA to carry on its strategy of engaging in pacification/extermination of ever more Indians. Frequently, after settlers had invaded the Indian territories guaranteed by prior treaties (and had begun taking or destroying Indian food sources on the Indian lands), the Indians were paid a nominal amount for the lands they were forced to give up (under threat of more violent expulsion) in a new treaty that would also be broken by the USA at some point thereafter (Domenech, 1860). The USA eventually signed over 350 treaties with various Indian tribes or nations and it broke each and every one of them (UAINE, 1998). Only thereb; was the USA able to expand westward. While the American Revolutionary War had freed the USA from the all-important British infringement on the country 's "right" to steal more land, the original 13 USA states generally maintained most of the same laws that they had created when they were autonomous states under British colonial rule. These laws included providing rewards for the extermination of Indians. In particular, the state governments set up by the settlers had begun in 1641 to establish legislation that offered rewards for the killing of any and all Indians (including men, women, and children, although special rewards were offered for Indian boy scalps), with such legislation continuing in effect into the late nineteenth century (Waters, 1977). Note that these laws and killings could scarcely be blamed on European countries, since the colony states had had full autonomy in setting such Jaws. In particular, the American settlers had locally elected their own legislatures and many other government officials (generally exhibiting even more democracy than existed in England itself), and "the common people probably had a stronger voice in their government in the English colonies than they did in any other part of the world at that time" (Chitwood, 1948). Having seen the prior "success" of the extermination laws in the eastem states, many of the new territories seized by the USA also adopted legislation paying for the killing of any and all Indians. Over ten territories and states with such extermination laws, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia, are listed just as examples by Waters ( 1977) and Churchill ( 1994). Although the individual states and territories were allowed to set up their own decentralized reward system for killing Indians, the genocide campaign was national in scope. The country's first president, George Washington, told his fellow Americans that Indians were to be "hunted like beasts," and the USA hero Thomas Jefferson said that the USA should "pursue [the Indians] into extermination" (Churchill, 1994). As a result, Indians were hunted like animals, and their springs were deliberately poisoned (Waters, 1977). Their villages were burned, their crops were destroyed, and successful efforts were undertaken to keep them from obtaining fish for food (Craven, 1968). In addition, diseases were deliberately spread among the Indians, and force was frequently used to drive the Indians from their hunting and crop lands (Thornton, 1987). Cook ( 1943) wrote that, to USA citizens, "all Indians were vermin, to be treated as such .... Since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of his troublesome presence was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years. Thus was carried on the policy which had wiped out en masse tribe after tribe across the continent." Stannard ( 1992) reported, "In 1784 a British visitor to America observed that 'white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race oflndians; nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children." This attitude eventually resulted in the "American aphorism 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian"' (Brown, 1970). Besides being offered cash rewards for killing Indians, USA citizens were also given a strong incentive to kill (or disperse or otherwise dispose of) the native American Indians in order to be able to seize their land that the USA government claimed and "sold" very cheaply (Strobel and Peterson, 1999). Miller ( 1975) has documented one case where a few USA settlers shot thousands of unarmed Indians (possibly over 10,000, including many on a reservation designated by the whites) from one peaceful tribe alone (the Yuki) over a short period of a few years in the mid-nineteenth century, and, despite the successful slaughter of virtually the entire tribe with almost no settler casualties, the murderers actually protested formally to their state governor when soldiers refused to help with the massacre. While the speed of the genocidal actions of this case (with over 90% of the tribe being directly murdered in less than a decade) may have exceeded the norm, the latter settler protest provides evidence that such genocidal acts were not only normally sanctioned but also expected. However, not all 5+ million Indians were shot. In true capitalist fashion, the USA succeeded in its genocide at a minimum cost in terms of resources expended, as those Indians who fled the livable land seized by the USA with its guns often died of starvation and disease ( Jaimes, 1992). To further expedite the extermination process at minimal expense, dogs were often used to hunt down the Indians (to save on the labor costs of hunting them), and, once caught, Indian children were sometimes killed by bashing their heads against t rees to save gunpowder costs ( Waters, 1977). Few Indians put up a fight, since 70% of the Indian tribes were outright pacifists (Sale, 199 1 ), and since most of the rest also realized that they could not win against the superior firepower of t�e white k!llers (Merriam, 1905). In this extermination campaign, stattonary Indtan farmers had little chance of survival and so some . ' lndtans attempted to escape from the USA's New Order by becoming s�ri�tly mobile hunters of buffalo and other game (Hobhouse, 1989), gtvmg up their extensive agricultural pursuits even on the breadbasket �f the Midwest (Larsen, 1994). Although this non-stationary form of hfe was contrary to most Indians' nature (Domenech, 1860), a number of Indians were able to successfully adapt to this environment, with one tribe (the Navajo which had historically been composed of nomadic hunters) even being able to prosper under these conditions, more than doubling its population between 1600 and 1860 (Meister, 1976). Nonetheless, in the end, few were able to escape from the genocidal policies of the USA, which reacted to the Indian hunting strategy by deliberately killing tens of millions of their buffalo food (and other game) in a deliberate attempt to starve the remaining Indians into extinction (Thornton, 1987). Nevertheless, because even these efficient extermination procedures were not fast enough for some white invaders, the USA frequently resorted to deliberately spreading diseases, such as by having items (like blankets) known to be in fected with deadly germs put in or near Indian settlements (Stannard, 1992). Jennings ( 1988) documents allegations that offering Indians "gifts" infected with smallpox was a "widespread" practice on the western frontier in the 1800s as well as earlier ( Jennings, 1988). There were also very serious Indian accusations of the USA infecting Indian prisoners with smallpox prior to releasing them back into their tribes to cause epidemics (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1925). Evidence exists that the deliberate spreading of disease by USA settlers began in the 1600s (Jaimes, 1992) and continued into the late 1800s (Stearn and Steam, 1945). Although "such things ... were not likely to be advertised to the world by the perpetrators" (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1925), concrete evidence has been uncovered for at least some of the terrible deeds (Jennings, 1988). In just one such campaign alone in the mid-nineteenth century, the USA may have killed several hundred thousand Indians by giving them blankets known to be infected with smallpox (Jaimes, 1992). Perhaps, partly as a result, there were Indian religious movements that preached a refusal to accept any gifts, tradable goods, or other items that had been in contact with the white settlers (Downes, 1940). Although other European invaders, especially the Spanish, also deliberately slaughtered many Indians (Stannard, 1992), the USA was by far the most atrocious. Just for instance, according to Cook ( 1943), the Indian population in California fell by only 33% between 1770 and 1848 during S panish and Mexican. rule, but it fell by over 800/o from this lower level during the first 32 years of USA rule from 1848-1880.4 In addition, in contrast to the fact that a significant portion of the drop in Indian population under Spanish and Mexican rule was due to Christian conversions and interracial marriages assimilating a number of the Indians into the "civilized" society, virtually all of the decline in Indian population under USA rule was caused by extermination policies that did not allow interracial marriages and assimilation until much later. In the USA, not just the military but virtually all who came into contact with the Indians were involved in the genocide, as the various local governments themselves had not only legalized the slaughter, but they also paid rewards for the killings (Waters, 1977). While the exact number of Indians slaughtered by the USA is not known, the evidence is too overwhelming to seriously question the deliberate and extensive nature of the genocide. The evidence also provides substantial support for a hypothesis that the number of unarmed innocent Indians deliberately killed by the USA far exceeds the very conservative 5 million estimated here.

Subsequent USA Killings of Innocent Unarmed Civilians

Scarcely had the USA's virtual extermination of the Indians been accomplished, and the USA sought out more lands to steal and more people to slaughter. After attacking and defeating Spain in the War of 1898, the USA proceeded to seize some of Spain 's former colonies such as the Philippines (Copeland, 2000). Although the people in many of the new lands now claimed by the USA did not conduct any major rebellion against their new rulers, a large Filipino resistance army had seized almost the entire Philippines from the Spanish before U SA troops arrived, and the U SA invaders had to wage an outright war against the Filipino people until 1902 (and fight off sporadic Filipino resistance until 19 15) in order to subdue the native population (Agoncillo, 1969). In retaliation for the resistance to the U SA's colonial conquest, the USA directly massacred hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians, while hundreds of thousands more died of starvation and disease trying to escape the massacre-- over 600,000 were killed on the Luzon island alone by early 190 1 according to the commanding USA general there (Franklin Bell), and that was before numerous subsequent massacres, in one of which over 100,000 more Filipinos on Luzon were killed according to statistics compiled by USA government officials ( Schirmer and Shalom, 1987). A USA Congressman who observed the "pacification" of the Philippines stated that the USA army "simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him" (Kamow, 1989). The U SA first began its newest form of terrorism through aerial bombardments of civilian targets in a war against enemies almost as atrocious : Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. Although the Germans and Japanese also committed terrible extermination campaigns in World War II, there is little moral difference between the German and Japanese killings of unarmed civilians perceived to be enemies and the USA's slaughter of unarmed innocent German and Japanese civilians in its deliberate terrorist bombardments of civilian targets, especially given the many USA aerial attacks that were deliberately aimed at civilian living quarters (Markusen and Kopf, 1 995). It should also be mentioned that Churchill ( 1994) has uncovered documents indicating the Nazis were merely following the USA's role model with respect to exterminating unwanted people. While figures provided by Markusen and Kopf ( 1995) indicate only 500,000 civilians killed by USA bombings in World War II, Webster s ( 1992) reports well over I ,000,000 German and Japanese civilian deaths in World War II. Since the USA dominated the aerial terror bombing campaign (with the only other major player, Britain, engaging in much smaller operations), most of those civilians must have been killed by the U SA (Markusen and Kopf, 1995). As for more modem atrocities through U SA aerial terrorist bombings, the slaughter of over 250,000 unarmed Laotian civilians during the period 1965-73 and of over 500,000 innocent unarmed Cambodian civilians during the 1969-73 interval (as estimated by the Finnish Inquiry Commission) is indicative ( Herman and Chomsky, 1988). These exterminations occurred at a time when there were no Cambodians or Laotians fighting Americans in any form. Given the fanatical anticommunism of many brainwashed Americans who do not perceive communists as people worthy of life, it should also be mentioned that few if any of the Cambodians and Laotians were even communists initially. Although in Vietnam there were indeed armed communist guerrillas fighting Americans, they were actually only struggling for the right to the free elections that the French bad promised upon their departure from the colony (Blum, 1995). Slaughtering possibly as many as ten innocent civilians with terrorist aerial bombings for every one "enemy" soldier killed (successfully exterminating an estimated 1,000,000 civilians by 1970) seems to represent deliberate murder, especially if these actions are considered in the light of the various extermination statements made by American leaders at the time (Herman, 1970). To try and justify such actions as being part of normal warfare is tantamount to trying to justify Hitler 's mass murder of the Jews because a small fraction might have taken up arms against him (Markusen and Kopf, 1995). Thayer ( 1985) cites estimates of only 200,000-400,000 civilians having died in Vietnam, but his figures are based on the number Qf civilians being admitted to South Vietnamese hospitals, and these numbers ignore the massive number of civilians killed in remote or communistcontrolled areas where USA air attacks were concentrated. While an exact figure for the number of Vietnamese civilians murdered by the USA is not known, McNamara ( 1999) bas cited Vietnamese government evidence of over one million Vietnamese civilian and military casualties per year, implying that millions of civilians were killed during the period of the heaviest USA involvement between 1965 and 1973, since estimates of military deaths (which may be more accurately measured) are only a million or so for the whole war (Bums and Lei ten berg, 1984). Vietnam officially reports 2 million civilian dead (CNN, 2000b), which would imply far more than 1 million maliciously murdered by the USA, given that Thayer's ( 1985) data imply collateral civilian casualties from actual military battles between opposing ground forces numbered far less than 400,000, and given that the communists themselves deliberately killed only about 40,000 civilians (Lewy, 1 978). Herman and Chomsky ( 1 988) report the total number of Vietnamese killed in the USA's war against Vietnam to be about 3 million, but all these figures may underestimate the true total, especially if one considers not only the direct murdering of civilians via USA aerial bombings a,, ·. ia traditional executions (by USA and puppet South Vietnamese ground forces) but also those killed indirectly as a result of the USA's deliberate attempts to murder millions by starvation through the destruction of food supplies (Zinn, 1995). Even in Iraq, where the USA might have seemed justified in fighting the Iraqis who had seized Kuwait in an almost bloodless invasion, it should be mentioned that Kuwait was an artificially created monarchy (Salinger and Laurent, 1991 ), which continues to maintain a repressive rule of that area of the world even after its "liberation" from Iraqi rule (Associated Press, 2000b). In particular, Kuwait was carved out of a larger Iraq shortly after World War I by the British (and made formally "independent" in 1 961 }, so that the vast oil resources there could continue to be controlled by capitalist companies subsequent to Britain giving up its Middle Eastern colonies (Blum, 1995). There is also some evidence that the USA plotted to encourage/provoke Iraq into its invasion in 1 990 to retake the territory (Salinger and Laurent, 1991 ). Regardless, for purpose of the body count, the USA's terrorist aerial bombardments on Iraq attacked mostly civilian targets (including civilian air raid shelters deliberately), directly resulting in the death of approximately 50,000 Iraqi civilians (Clark, 1992) and almost completely destroying the civilian economy (Laffin, 1 994). Moreover, the USA bombings deliberately and systematically destroyed vital civilian targets (such as irrigation systems, power plants, and sewage disposal systems), and this destruction combined with the continuing embargo against Iraq have resulted in extremely poor sanitary conditions, inadequate medical services, hunger, and related disease that has killed over one million Iraqi civilians, a very large number of whom are children according to a United Nations (UN) study (Flounders, l 998b). In addition, the USA's use of depleted uranium weapons in the 1991 war continue to cause tens of thousands of cases of terminal illnesses (such as leukemia and ancer) for those who live near to where such weapons were used (lAC, 1998b). Although the USA was able to use the UN as a cover for its military attacks on Iraq in 1991, the USA alone was responsible for its massive bombing of civilian targets, and although the embargo of lraq was originally agreed to by the UN in 1990 after Iraq occupied Kuwait, it has been the USA vetoes (with British support) of UN proposals to lift the trade sanctions that have perpetuated the embargo long after the Iraqi withdrawal (Flounders, 1998b ). W hile the USA has agreed to loosen the trade sanctions in recent years to allow the import of some nutritional items (including alcohol) and luxury goods (like cars), many necessities (like parts to rebuild Iraq's power and transportation infrastructure, agricultural and medical equipment or components, and even medicines) are still held up by the USA, as the USA continues to try to terrorize the Iraqi people into overthrowing their leader, whom the USA government leaders just happen not to like (King, 2000). Even a USA congressional representative has recently called the USA-led (and USA-enforced) embargo against Iraq "a horrendous policy-it's infanticide" (CNN, 2000a). USA Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's statement that the mass killing of civilians in Iraq is "worth it" as a means to achieve the desired political goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power verifies the deliberate nature of the USA's extermination of innocent Iraqi civilians (lAC, 1998b ). As for the crimes of the CIA and its controlled leaders, Indonesia is a good example. There in 1 965, the CIA had one of its allied Indonesian military leaders (Suharto) overthrow the elected government in a coup and then proceed to murder close to one million unarmed communists and other civilians, who had been part of, or identified with, a previously elected coalition government (Griswold, 1 979). While the CIA gave the Indonesian government a great deal of latitude in slaughtering virtually any people with left-wing opinions, the CIA also provided lists of thousands of specific Indonesians to be exterminated (Blum, 1995). The communists here, like the Jews under Hitler, offered virtually no resistance as they were killed by combinations of army troops, police, and gangs or paramilitary forces that were specifically armed by the CIA for the task (Levene and Roberts, 1999). In addition, the same CIA ally (Suharto) slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in one of his annexed provinces (East Timor) in the 1970s and 1 980s (Blum, 1995). While some of the estimates of the number killed exceed a million in the 1 965-66 blood bath alone (Levene and Roberts, 1999), Amnesty International estimates between 500 000 and 1 000 000 , , , were murdered in the 1965-66 extermination campaign, while a further 200,000 have been killed in East Timor (Blum, 1 995). A lthough some might not blame the USA in cases like this indirect mass murder, to exonerate the USA here would be equivalent to excusing Hitler for most of his murders, because he had foreign followers and "protectorate" governments in Croatia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Austria, and other countries carry out much of his slaughter, and because most of his victims (including most Jews) were foreigners in terms of never having resided in Germany (Markusen and Kopf, 1995). The largest extermination campaign not yet mentioned occurred in Korea. In particular, the South Korean military dictatorship that was put into power by the USA after World War II was busy killing unarmed civilians with left-wing opinions in South Korea even before the Korean War broke out in 1 950. Ho, Hui, and Ho ( 1 993) estimate that about 100,000 unarmed South Korean civilians were executed by the South Korean government before 1950, while Scheffer ( 1999) cites a South Korean army veteran's estimate of several hundred thousand. The Korean war itself (provoked by frequent South Korean military invasions ofNorth Korea) gave the South Korean government the ability to greatly increase the number of executions without attracting too much internat.ional notice (Blum, 1 995). In addition, early in the war, the U.S. military officially ordered all civilian refugees to be shot (Workers World. 2000b). Ho, Hui, and Ho ( 1 993) estimate that one million South Korean civilians were murdered by USA and South Korean forces during the 1 950-53 war, while several hundred thousand North Korean civilians were slaughtered during the short time of occupation by USA and South Korean forces (often via gruesome procedures such as by burying masses of people alive, burning large groups of civilians alive in locked buildings, and even pouring gasoline down the throats of babies screaming for milk). Until recently, any South Korean who talked about these crimes (including victims or relatives of victims) faced a prison sentence in their country (Griswold, 2000). Halliday ( 1981) indicates the extent of such USA atrocities in Korea to be "probably true," and he reports specific evidence such as a USA diplomat admitting to the killing of over 100,000 South Korean civilians after the USA reoccupation of South Korea, and the sending of thugs and dispossessed landlords to North Korea during the temporary USA occupation of that country in 1 950. Besides these mass murders, the USA slaughtered many more North Korean civilians in its terror bombings ofNorth Korea that destroyed virtually all civilian buildings there during the Korean War (Smith et al., 1 996). As a result, demographics indicate that the North Korean male (female) population fell from 4,782,000 in 1 949 to 3,982,000 in 1953, while the female population fell from 4,840,000 to 4,509,000 over the same time interval (Halliday, 1981 ). These numbers, which are consistent with those estimated by McCormack and Selden ( 1978), indicate over a million North Koreans lost even assuming the birth rate actually fell to the normal peacetime death rate during this stressful period (the 33 1 ,000 drop in the North Korean female population imply that a large portion of those killed were indeed innocent civilians). A plausible estimate is that 12-15% of the North Korean people (or 1 .2 to 1.4 million people) alone were killed during the Korean War (Smith et al., 1 996), not to mention the million or so South Korean civilians killed by the USA and its puppets, for a total of about 2 million civilians (Ayling, 2000). A general source of details on the crimes ofthe USA since World War II is Blum ( 1995). The list of mass murders committed by USA bombings or CIA puppets includes dozens of additional countries, among the most infamous of which were the slaughtering of over 1 50,000 Guatemalans in what Amnesty International has called a "program of political murder" (Harbury, 1 994), at least 75,000 El Salvadorian civilians (Blum, 1995), at least 40,000 Colombians (Mcinerney, 1998), and at least 10,000 Chileans (Sandford, 1976),5 not to mention the thousands of civilians who have been killed by USA actions in many other countries such as Iran, Nicaragua, and Angola (Blum, 1995).6 The body count in Table 1 does not incorporate any USA crimes which may have been committed but for which there is currently little or no evidence. For instance, Keeler ( 1989) reports that the CIA had an Operation Pique that was designed to affect the mental attitudes and behavior of employees at nuclear power plants in communist Eastern Europe, implying some intent to cause a nuclear meltdown/holocaust. Given the very bizarre and otherwise virtually inexplicable behavior of the employees who caused the nuclear disaster at Chemobyl in the Soviet Union in 1 986 (Medvedev, 1 99 1 ), it is possible that the USA's Operation Pique may have had something to do with it (and therefore may be responsible for the thousands of deaths which resulted but which are not counted here). In addition, because the focus is on the deliberate murder of unarmed civilians, Table 1 does not count the many unarmed Japanese POWs who were slaughtered by the USA (Dower, 1 986). Nor are all the people killed by USA embargoes counted in Table 1, as only the million Iraqi civilians clearly and deliberately killed by the USA through a combination of blockade and terror bombing of civilian targets are included in the 11 + million figure.7 Nor does this analysis count the effect of the USA's use of modem US biological weapons, some of which may have been deliberately launched against countries like Cuba (Franklin, 1992) and North Korea (Ho, Hui, and Ho, 1993), and others may have just "escaped" the laboratory (Horowitz, 1997). This analysis also does not incorporate some of the other atrocities deliberately committed by the USA, in which there may have been a substantial amount of harm and torture inflicted but few dead bodies. For instance, there is some evidence that the CIAINSA does engage in mind control torture (often through cults and other front organizations), and even estimates as high as 10 million victims (many of whom may, as a result, have their lives wasted in mental asylums or be lost through suicide and other unnatural deaths) have been cited in a 1995 Texas conference on the subject (sponsored by the Freedom ofThought Foundation) in the video "The Rosetta Stone to the Unconscious." Note here that the NSA stands for the National Security Agency, about which most Americans knew nothing for decades, although it was the largest "intelligence" organization in the USA (Bamford, 1983), thereby providing an indication of the enormous potential for secret undisclosed crimes of the USA secret police (since most Americans had never even heard of the NSA much less knew of its covert actions). Some interesting sources on the CIA/NSA crimes committed in the USA are Bowart ( 1 978), Stich ( 1 994), and Constantine (1995), who also document some of the cooperation between the USA "intelligence" agencies and organized crime, including joint efforts to sell narcotics. The latter activi ties may not really be so surprising given that the drug trade was actually instrumental in the spreading of British capitalism and colonial rule (Tho'Mas, 1997). While some of the reports on the activities described in this paragraph (but not countable in the aggregate documented body count reported in Table l) may be exaggerated (or distorted in some way, as would be expected in mind torture activities), they merit mention because of the paucity of mainstream media coverage of the evidence on these issues and because of the lack of evidence refuting the claims. The foregoing measurement of the USA's mass murders also does not include its part in one of the worst atrocities in history: the enslavement of millions of Africans. Tens of millions of Africans died (mostly on land) while being forcefully transported to their new "homes" in America (Stannard, 1 992). Capitalist countries spread a belief that Africans were "half-animal" in order to "justify" their cruel enslavement (Chin, 2000), at the same time that they spread the gospel that free trade (including in people) would benefit all. However, the facts indicate that_ "there can be no doubt that the level of culture among the masses of Negroes in West Africa in the fifteenth century was higher than that of northern Europe, by any standard of measurement-homes, clothes, artistic creation and appreciation, political organization and religious consistency" (DuBois, 1 965). Africans were also way ahead of the whites in many areas of technology, astronomy, and navigation at the time, possibly even having "discovered" America a century before Columbus bungled into it (Chin, 2000). However, despite the cultural superiority of African culture, the European colonialists had superior weaponry through which they were able to win control of Africa by application of direct military force and by paying and arming African "allies" (Davidson, 1 961 ). The African puppets of the whites were manipulated (through intrigues, bribes, and threats) into serving the will of their European masters to have the human "goods" delivered (in return for more weapons and luxury items) into the middle of the nineteenth century (lsaacman and lsaacman, 1983 ). The slave trade itself robbed Africa of its prime workers and created a chaotic society that focused on obtaining slaves for export instead of on domestic production of real goods (DuBois, 1965). In particular, the African economic and social system was destroyed by Europeans' profitable use of exploitative trade strategies, which involved selling mas� produced luxury goods to the African rich (especially to the slave tradmg puppets themselves) in return for slaves and other commodities thereby reducing the demand for traditional African production for th� ?lack masses and �hu . s bankrupting local African producers. This system IS actually very snrular to the methods utilized by the USA today to destroy foreign economies and to economically enslave much of the world, as will be explained later in Chapters 6 and 7. Alt�?ugh t�e USA was not the only country involved in committing atroc1t1es agamst slaves, the USA treatment of Africans was in many respects worse than the other major players such as the Spanish. In � articular: there were less slaves brought to the USA than to the SpanISh colomes (at least partially because the USA had less people and money than the Spanish colonies initially), and so the USA was not able to murder, rape, and torture as many as the Spanish. However, the USA slavery laws were much more atrocious insofar as they made the blacks and their descendants slaves forever, whereas the Spanish did not enslave the offspring and even allowed most of their existing slaves to earn or buy their freedom eventually (Teepen, 1 998). For instance, in contrast to the early nineteenth century USA where blacks were almost always slaves, the proportion of the African population that was free had risen in 1 808 (after only I 00 years of slavery) to over 75% in one Spanish colony of the Western Hemisphere (Sharp, 1 976). In addition, many think slavery ended in the USA in the 1 860s, after the northern USA states executed a plan to free the slaves in the southem states (formally announced in 1 863) as part of a successful military/ �litical effort to win (by 1 865) a very bloody civil war, which began (m 1 861) when the northern states tried to impose a protectionist tariff system on the country as a whole, and the southern states (which wanted "free trade" in both goods and people) seceded from the union in protest (Copeland, 2000). However, after the southern whites lost the civil war, they created a form of neo-slavery by forcing blacks to sign work contracts that essentially sold their freedom and lives to white owners in return for being allowed to live (Lewis, 1 998). Because the blacks had no money, no food, and no land, they bad no other choice (Zinn, 1 995). This "efficient" system (which provided capitalists not only with the advantage of cheap black labor and lowered the cost of agricultural raw materials for industry but also drove down the cost of competing white labor and thereby made USA industry even more competitive) lasted into the 1 900s (Finkin, 1 997). As documented by Patterson ( 1970), such explicit forms of slavery have been replaced with more subtle forms of racism and wage slavery in the twentieth century that are similar to those used by Nazi Germany against the Jews before their extermination in World War II, and data indicate that this system has resulted in the early death of over 30,000 blacks per year in the USA (cumulating to millions of deaths over time). The significantly higher death rates for USA blacks have continued into the twenty-first century, with USA blacks still having a life expectancy over five years less than for USA whites (mostly because of poverty), and with blacks therefore continuing to have to pay higher life insurance premiums (Paltrow, 2000) that (among many other biases) further impoverish them (and therefore actually contribute to the higher death rates themselves in a typically circular capitalist process of making the poor ever poorer). Perhaps fittingly, the USA continues to honor explicit slaveowners on almost all of its paper money (including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benjamin Franklin), with even the exception of Abraham Lincoln (on the $5 bill) having once said, "I do not stand pledged for the prohibition ofthe slave trade between the states. I, as much as any man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race" (Cosby, 1 998). With many of these slaveowners (such as Andrew Jackson and George Washington) also having been mass murderers of Indians (Churchill, 1 994), it seems appropriate to honor them on the very money and wealth which was derived in large part from the policies of black slavery and Indian genocide. The Table 1 count also does not include the many millions of other people who died in the USA in the past as a result of the capitalist economic system. Besides slavery, this system caused harsh working conditions (as exemplified by many male and female children as young as 6 years old having to work 1 00 hours per week just to survive), unemployment, poor living conditions, and general poverty (Zinn, 1 995). The resulting deaths do not appear to be deliberate, even though the only crime for which these millions were killed was that they were born poor in a capitalist society. Nor does this analysis of USA mass murders incorporate any of the repressive aspects of the formal police state that exists in the USA itself. In particular, the USA is a leader in the number of police per capita and in the percent of the population locked up in prison, with 5 times as many prisoners per capita as the rest of the world (Butterfield, 2000). The per capita prison population in the USA in the 1 980s (and today) was actually more than twice as high as that in what the USA used to refer to as the Eastern European communist "police states" (UN, 1994). In addition, the total number of uniformed, undercover, private, secret police, and related administrative personnel in the USA is about 1% of the population (Reynolds, 1 994) and even exceeds the per capita numbers of 1 988 East Germany, which was reputed to be among the most notorious of the "police states" ofEastern Europe (Diedrich, Ehlert, and Wenzke, 1 998).

Other Countries Ranked in the Top Ten in Exterminations of People

While other countries have also committed mass murder on a grand scale, their atrocities rank lower than the USA in all cases. Only two other countries even come close to the USA in terms of the magnitude of their extermination campaigns. Germany ranks number 2 in mass murders largely because Nazi Germany under Hitler's capitalist rule in the 1933-45 interval deliberately killed over 10 million civilians (most during the war years of 1941-45), including over 5 million non-Jewish Soviet civilians, 5 million Jews, and hundreds of thousands of others (Markusen and Kopf, 1995). Many were executed directly, but millions of others were deliberately slaughtered more indirectly through hunger and disease in concentration camps or in scorched-earth occupied territories (Elliot, 1 972). The Nazis actually used the USA as a role model in some of their racial policies and extermination campaigns (Churchill, 1 994) that so greatly enhanced the profits (and stock prices) of the German corporations, which had been instrumental in financing Hitler's democratic election to power (Feinberg, 1 999). For instance, a December 2, 1 941 German Economic Armament Staff report stated the objective of the scorchedearth policies in the occupied territories as "the elimination of the surplus eaters (Jews and the population of the Ukrainian �ities such as Kiev, which receive no food rations at all)," indicating deliberate mass murder (Wytwycky, 1982). Slightly less than half the Soviets and only about half the Jews were killed with poison gas or executions (Elliot, 1972). The number of civilians (especially the number of Soviet and Polish civilians) killed by Nazi Germany would be even larger if all those who died of exploitation (i.e., overwork and undernourishment) were included, as Elliot ( 1972) and Wytwycky ( 1982) have indicated. The Nazi holocaust was not the first mass murder committed by Germany. In particular, German troops had previously used a practice of violently forcing "undesirable" natives in their South West African colony in the late nineteenth century into an unlivable desert (and firing at any Africans trying to return to their own land), thereby exterminating tens of thousands of the Herero people there (Levene and Roberts, 1999). Eventually, some of the remaining natives were allowed into concentration camps, where harsh conditions killed thousands more. There are certainly similarities here to the USA's genocide of the native Americans, although it is clearly on a far smaller scale and did not employ all the gruesome tactics used by the USA (e.g., the Germans did not offer rewards for the killing of any and all natives, did not deliberately spread disease, and did not deliberately destroy native food and water resources-moreover, the Germans always allowed the live capture of female natives and spoke of the "annihilation" of the Herero nation as opposed to the extermination of the people themselves, providing for some possibility of an "enslavement" alternative). Regardless, Germany's killings of the Soviets, Jews, Herero, and others are not sufficiently large to put the country into first place, especially since the eleven million estimated killed by the USA represents an extremely low estimate (as previously explained) and may greatly understate the true number of victims (which may very well exceed 20 million). Spain ranks number 3 in terms of mass murders because it committed genocide of Indians in its conquest of Central and South America in the middle of this millenium, with many Indian noncombatants being slaughtered with a combination of weapons and dogs, and many more dying indirectly through starvation and disease as they fled the massacres (Stannard, 1992). While some have estimated a "disappearance" of tens of millions of Indians from Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere (Stannard, 1 992), estimates of initial Indian populations in Central and South America may have been way too high, as explained in Denevan ( 1976) and Henige ( 1998). In addition, ofthe millions oflndians who did once live in Spanish America, many were killed in battle and from related causes (such as from starvation and disease on the front lines of military sieges of fortified cities defended by armed combatants), and many more died as a result of the harsh living and working conditions they had to endure as Spanish slaves (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990) or as overtaxed serfs (Borah and Cook, 1969). A large portion of the Indians in Spanish America died of disease, which spread rapidly in the environment of Spanish conquest (Stannard, 1992), but Spain's official policy was one of forcing the conversion of the Indians to Christianity and subservience as opposed to outright genocide (Jaimes, 1992). As a result, except for the deaths resulting from some of the initial genocidal policies followed by the Spanish Conquistadors, who may have engaged in willful extermination policies that contributed to the spreading of disease (Larsen, 1994), most of the Indian deaths are not counted as deliberate murders. In particular, the Spanish generally sought via slavery (and extracting raw materials like gold from their land) to economically exploit the Indians (and not kill them), and, in contrast to the USA policy of offering rewards for the killing of natives, Spain even punished "heroes" like Columbus just for excessively exploiting the Indians (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990). In addition, a significant portion of the decline in the Indian population of Central and South America can be attributable to the Spanish policy of separating the Indian male slaves from the females for substantial periods of time and by working them so hard even when they were allowed to meet that they had "little inclination for marital communication; in this fashion they ceased procreation" (Cook, 1998). Moreover, a large part of the reduction in the pure Indian population in the Spanish colonies was due to interracial mating, as many Indians were assimilated into society via Christian conversions, and most Spanish freely married with the Indians (Driver, 196 1). Although Spain has also committed atrocities against non-Indian peoples, such as during the Inquisition (which mostly involved the Christian murder of non-Christians), it has not been involved in any material atrocities in the last few decades. An exact number of noncombatants deliberately killed by the Spanish is not known, but it may exceed 5 million (Stannard, 1992). The remaining countries in the top ten killed far less people. For instance, number 4 Pakistan murdered as many as three million Bengalis in 1971 (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990), number 5 Japan slaughtered over a million Chinese civilians in its invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s as well as conducted several lesser atrocities (Markusen and Kopf, 1995), number 6 Turkey exterminated over a million unarmed Armenian civilians between 1915 and 1922, as well as thousands of people in the Balkans in prior years (Levene and Roberts, 1999) and thousands of Kurds in subsequent years (Andreopoulos, 1994), number 7 czarist Russia slaughtered over a million people in a purge ofCircassians from its Caucasus provinces (Levene and Roberts, 1999), number 8 Nigeria killed over a million of its ethnic Ibo civilians (via flagrant mass murder, blatant aerial bombings of civilians, and deliberate efforts to prevent Red Cross and other relief supplies from reaching a starving civilian population) in a war against its secessionist Biafra province (Forsyth, 1969), number 9 France massacred over 500,000 in its colonies (Smith, 2000), and number 10 Britain legalized the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, including over 200,000 aborigines in Australia after ruling the country to be ''uninhabited" in 1788 (Reynolds, 1995), and over 300,000 Irish in the seventeenth century (Levene and Roberts, 1999) in a parliament-approved campaign that "treated all sections of Irish as if they were, not humans but beasts," and that imposed the death penalty for Irish found repeatedly communicating with Catholic priests or failing to leave land seized by British soldiers (MacManus, 1973). 1 It is interesting to observe that, with the exception of Japan, all of the countries in the top ten are religiously Christian or Moslem. . In addition, all of the countries in the top ten just happen to be capitalISt ones, even though no "credit" is being given here for the millions who have died of starvation and disease as a result of colonialism and other methods of capitalist economic exploitation, as those people like the millions who perished in the slave trade) died as a result of the crue�ty of the capitalist economic system as opposed to being deliberately ktlle s d (Marx and Engels, 1988b ). The criteria used in this study to mea­ � the magnitude of human exterminations ignores all such deaths which are not clearly deliberate. For instance, the deaths of millions of slaves who died in transit from Africa were not caused by deliberat extermination policies, but instead by poor living conditions that can be attributed to the capitalist system which put a positive value on the slaves' lives but not high enough to provide them with adequate food, water, quarters, medicine, and sanitary conditions (Miller, 1988). To provide perspective here, it should be mentioned that there is some evidence that the death rate of the "free" white crew members who transported the slaves was about as high as that of the slaves (Curtin, 1969), providing an indication of the relative value (and the kill rate) of workers in general under capitalism (but not implying a general intent to kill them).9 From a legal perspective, the primary reason for not including deaths related to pure economic exploitation in the atrocity count is the fact that deliberately killing workers (even one's own slaves), was generally against the law, even though such murder was only a misdemeanor in the USA when the victim was a slave (Nicholson, 1 994). Thus, under this legal framework, the massive deaths resulting from capitalist economic exploitation are not considered intentional killings. However, the executions of runaway slaves are (although the numbers are too small relative to the other USA mass murders to be listed separately in Table I and are instead essentially incorporated into the "Other" account), just as the mass slaughter of civilians of specific countries with bombings and embargoes is counted as deliberate murder because it was not only allowed but even ordered by the USA (and killing Indians in any fashion was obviously even more deliberate insofar as it was not only legal but also encouraged by the USA with rewards of money and land).

Caveats on the Refutation of Communist Atrocities

Given the distorted reputation of communist countries in the capitalist press (Herman and Chomsky, 1988), some may find it surprising that no communist countries made the top ten, especially since even many skeptics of the mainstream media (and left-wing critics of the USA) often recite the anticommunist propaganda they hear in the mainstream press, such as by referring to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as "one of the twentieth century's most bloody dictatorships" (Str� bel and Peterson, 2000). However, the widespread belief that com- . mumst governments have killed millions is largely a myth that is spread by th� capi�list press, which is heavily influenced by the CIA and its fanatical anticommunist allies (Blum, 1 995). '0 For example, many blame Pol Pot for the deaths of millions of his own people during his rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, with some being executed for collaborating in the USA's murder of a half million Cambodian civilians through aerial bombardments, and with many more being killed for attempting a coup against him in reaction to his military attacks on Vietnam revolving around a border dispute (Kiernan, 1996). However, the neutral Finnish Inquiry Commission investigated and found that the number executed by Pol Pot was only between 75,000 and 1 50,000 (Herman and Chomsky, 1 988). While it is true that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died of starvation and disease under Pol Pot's regime, these deaths do not appear to be any more deliberate than the poor who die of similar causes under capitalism. In fact, many of these deaths were the result of the USA bombings themselves, which had destroyed Cambodian agriculture (via the destruction of 75% of its draft animals and substantial amounts of rural housing, as well as the depopulation of the countryside that resulted from millions fleeing to the cities to escape the USA bombings). Despite a forecast by sources close to the USA government that a million people would die in 1975 if Cambodia were deprived of USA aid (which had been partially feeding the starving, refugeeswollen cities before Pol Pot seized power), the USA not only stopped aid after Pol Pot became ruler but also imposed an embargo against the country it had so terribly bombed (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). Some imports of food from communist China and Pol Pot's forcing of the city dwellers to the farms shortly after his takeover in 1975 prevented the disaster from being any worse (Kiernan, 1 996). It should also be mentioned that, subsequent to Pol Pot's removal from power (which occurred after the Vietnamese army counterattacked and occupied Cambodia in 1 979), the USA supported Pol Pot in his guerrilla war against the occupying Vietnamese troops (Blum, 1995). In addition, given the USA history of using diplomacy, bribes, and extortion to stir up tensions between communist countries (Griswold, 1972), it is possible that the USA itself had played a part in promoting the deadly rivalry between Cambodia and Vietnam that motivated many of Pol Pot's killings (Klinghoffer, 1 998). Regardless, Pol Pot's execution of 75,000-150,000 people is a horrible crime, although it is not enough to make the top ten. 11

In a similar grotesque exaggeration of the truth, Rummel ( 1991) and others claim that communist China murdered tens of millions of people, especially during the period 1 950-52 (shortly after the communist seizure of power) and during the Cultural Revolution in the 1 960s. However, such estimates are largely based on various sources that are either unpublished or published for propaganda purposes by the Anti-Communist League of Nationalist China on the island of Taiwan, which appears to have completely fabricated the numbers (Teiwes, 1 997), in an apparent attempt to ')ustify" its military attacks on communist China that continued long after the communists' seizure of power (Associated Press, 1950). Schuman ( 19 56) even saw and talked with some specific people in communist China after they were alleged to have been executed. More accurate figures are provided by Chinese government sources. In particular, Grunfeld ( 1996) has found a substantial amount of evidence indicating that Chinese government reports in such matters (despite being cloaked in ideological verbiage) are fairly reliable, especially in comparison to Western estimates that are often based on limited and biased refugee claims, "wild exaggerations," or even outright fabrications. 12 For instance, in the 1950-52 interval (at a time when China was fighting the USA in Korea in a war that threatened to escalate into China itself), the Chinese government publicly reported (and displayed) its executions, many of which were also publicized in the USA press at the time (Associated Press, 1 951 ). The local Chinese government announced a total of 28,332 executions for one province (Kwantung) during the 1950-1951 interval, and if that figure were extrapolated proportionally to the rest of the country, it would imply about 400,000 official deaths (Stavis, 1 978). However, that province was a coastal one near Hong Kong and may have had an abnormally high number of executions. Other information provided by Chinese government leaders indicates 1 35,000 executions nationwide based on 800,000 official trials and a reported 1 6.8% execution rate of "counterrevolutionaries" at the height of the death sentence campaign in 1 951 (Meisner, 1999). In addition to the official government death sentences, there were also many executions carried out independently by the local peasants, who may very well have killed tens of thousands of landlords (in retaliation for the prior decades of mass starvation inflicted upon them) and other perceived enemies such as agents or supporters of the former Nationalist Chinese government on the mainland (Teiweis, 1997). There is one Chinese source estimate of 7 10,000 victims between 1950 and 1952 (Gong, 1 994), but that figure may reflect a speech made by Mao in the 1 950s that referred to so many "liquidations" (Stavis, 1978), which the anticommunist propagandist Rummel ( 1 991) himself admits "could simply mean to remove, deactivate, or make ineffective, rather than kill." In addition, since there was still some fighting going on with as many as 400,000 Nationalist Chinese guerrillas or bandits at the time (Gong, 1 994), and since the western and southwestern parts of mainland China remained under Nationalist Chinese rule until 1951 (Kwong, 1 997), it is possible that some of the 7 10,000 "liquidations" were related to the killing (or disbursing) of soldiers and armed guerrillas, and some of the actual executions may have been of noncivilian POWs. Moreover, fear of arrest during the 1 950-52 strife may have motivated as many as 500,000 people to commit suicide (Teiweis, 1997), and these deaths may have been included in the 7 10,000 "liquidations." While the suicides were certainly caused by the communist Chinese seizure of power and subsequent campaign of public trials, they could not be considered willful murders (especially given the fairly low rate of death sentences in the trials). As a result, the true number of deliberate killings of unarmed civilians is likely to have been far below 710,000 during the 1 950-52 interval. Gong ( 1994) cites an official Chinese report of 230,000 people put under public surveillance and 1 ,270,000 imprisoned by the communist Party in the 1950-52 interval. lf the officially cited ratio of about 1 execution for every 6 convictions were applied to that data (with the other 5 of 6 convicted people being put under surveillance or imprisoned), it would indicate about 300,000 executions during that period. However, even that number may be an overestimate, as the official rate of sentencing "counterrevolutionaries" to be put under public surveillance (32%) documented by Meisner (1999) was much higher than Gong's (1994) figures indicate. The differences in the imprisonment rates may be due to the fact that the latter figures include many people imprisoned for P�/political corruption (Schuman, 1956) as opposed to "counterrevolutionary" activities. Applying to Gong's (1994) data Meisner's (1999) cited ratio of about l execution for every 2 people put under observation would imply less than 200,000 executions over the 1 950-52 period. Mao did clearly admit that several of his leaders killed 35,000 people through cruel treatment in prisons during the Cultural Revolution during the 1 960s, but it should also be mentioned that he had those leaders responsible tried and executed (MacFarquhar, 1 993). While there was some violent fighting during the Cultural Revolution (Dietrich, 1994), and while MacFarquhar (1993) cites some estimates of the number of killed in the hundreds of thousands, he admits such high numbers are based on flimsy evidence that extrapolates potentially exaggerated guesses of killings from refugees fleeing areas with a greater amount of disorder. As Deleyne (1974) indicated, the rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution was very violent, there were a significant number of arrests, and two hundred thousand people were thrown out of the Communist Party, but there was very little actual violence, and the number of people actually killed in the 1 960s probably approximates the Chinese government estimate of 35,000. The total number of people killed by communist China is therefore probably low enough to keep the country out of the top ten in mass murders, although more evidence on the issue is certainly needed to be sure of the exact number. 13 Rummel ( 1 99 1 ) and MacFarquhar (1993) have also blamed Mao for tens of millions of Chinese deaths during a famine in 1 958-6 1, but the magnitude of such deaths may be overstated, and they certainly do not represent deliberate killings. In particular, managerial errors (especially with respect to a rapid attempt to attain huge economies of scale without adequately addressing small group incentive and initiative issues), a relatively greater investment focus on industry (for national security reasons related to ongoing USA Cold War threats), and very poor weather caused the catastrophe (Meurs, 1 999). In addition, it should also be mentioned that, even if there had been as many as 10 million additional deaths annually (compared to 6 million officially recorded by the Chinese government) during that 3-year disaster (Aston et al., 1 984), it would not have even brought the death rate up to the level of the pre-communist era. For instance, Deleyne ( 1 974) states that the annual death rate in China had been 3.4% in normal peaceful (and "prosperous") times in the 1 930s under capitalism, whereas the death rate had fallen to 1.1% by the mid-1 950s under communism. 14 Applying the difference of 2.3% to a population of 600 million Chinese, yields a figure of over 10 million lives saved per year by Mao's communist policies that both increased incomes in the aggregate and equalized them across the population. Even if a catastrophic extra 10 million deaths did occur annually in the famine of 1 958-61, the annual death rate was still below that of pre-communist China during normal times, and so Mao's policies saved few lives even in the years of his worst mistakes and misfortune. The Soviet Union is also reputed to have murdered tens of millions of people, mostly during the period of Stalin's rule between 1930 and 1953 (Rummel, 1 990). In the first chapter of this book, this allegation along with many other myths about Eastern Europe, communism, and its collapse, will be shown to be untrue. 15

Conclusion

This objective investigation indicates that the USA, which has had the most continuous, widespread history of committing atrocities of any country in the world, is truly number 1 in exterminating innocent unarmed civilians. Although this finding is in contrast to the opinion held by so many Americans that the USA is the "good guy," it is consistent with the perception of parts of the rest of the world that often view the USA and its world policeman policies as hypocritical (Thadani, 1998). The measured discoveries of this research are also consistent with the opinion of some that the USA is "the biggest terrorist in the world" (Moorehead, 1 998).

The Documented Facts about Eastern Europe and Communism: A Refutation of Popular Myths about the True Good Guys

A Post-Mortem Comparison of Communist and Capitalist Societies Using the German Case as an Illustration

A Detailed Autopsy of the Collapse of the Superior System in the Divided Germany

A Comparative Analysis of East and West German Financial Systems in Light of the New Evidence

An Applied Investigation into a Plan for Easing the Transition to Economic Competitiveness Using East Germany as an Example

A Detailed Evaluation of Currency Crises and Balance of Payment Problems in the New World Order

A Summary Political Analysis of USA World Domination