A follow-up to the Open Letter to the International Criminal Court on the Genocide Conspiracy Against North Korea
As Science for Peace members continue to discuss the Open Letter to the International Criminal Court on the Genocide Conspiracy against North Korea,
it is important to overcome the denial of genocide itself which
proceeds in many guises and has been promoted for a long time by
dominant US-led states, media and their followers across the world. We
must remember we are named Science for Peace, and such denial undermines
science and reason at the roots.
With the people and society of North Korea,
the same operations of denial have gone into play as endlessly before
in the wider context of US-led world power in Indonesia, Vietnam, Latin
America, Iraq, Palestine arguably throughout, and so on. Since the
North Korean people have already suffered the death of an estimated
third of their population by US-led armed forces in previous years,
non-stop and imminent nuclear threats against them, and life-destructive
embargo, where does it end?
As long as genocide denial governs
the dominant discourse beneath recognition, it can go on from one
people to the next whose social order does not conform to the
US-enforced geopolitical agenda. The major operation is to deny there is
an issue at all, that genocide is only a political term or that the
leader of the people suffering genocide is evil. There is no end of this
operation even today, as we see in from the lead denial camp within
Science for Peace.
Denial is backed up by a more commonplace diversion from ever
mentioning genocide at all, and directing of all attention instead, at
best, to the evils of war and nuclear weapons in general, or to the
US-designated Enemy who is passionately blamed for evils that, while
even true, are incomparably less life-threatening and mass murderous
than the US-led forces of genocide which are in operation yet again with
the same modus operandi.
This reverse projection operation seems
never to be named except to elicit the circle of genocidal denial all
over again. “Do you support the corrupt and evil brute Saddam Hussein?”
goes to “Kim is the most corrupt despot and brute in the world”. In this
way, the society and its people – usually with better public health
care than the US accuser – are once again ground into permanent
destitution and dependent helplessness.
Is this the real objective that genocide denial assists in implementing without knowing it?
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John McMurtry Ph.D (University College London) is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor (emeritus) of Philosophy.
