Afrasianet - Dr. Mazen Al-Najjar - Since the fall of Granada (1492), the beginning of the era of the Catholic Inquisition, the beginning of the Protestant Religious Reformation  (1517-1648), and the revival of the Old Testament and the Hebrew spirit, the movement of geographical discovery, settlement and colonization has begun, especially in the Americas, which witnessed the largest wave of settlement and the most horrific forms of violence and genocide in human history.

The Oxford Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group", and this has been exactly what has happened since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and other countries in Asia and Africa, and this practice continues to this moment at least in Palestine, as the most important operations and movements of the international system It was established by global imperialism, under which humanity tasted woes, and whose success and enlargement were linked to the extermination of indigenous groups by siege, exploitation, mutilation and deprivation.

Later in the 20th century, the center of gravity of the global imperialist project shifted from traditional European colonial powers that undertook the project of settlement, colonialism and plunder, to the United States, the largest exterminated imperialist settler entity in human history.

David Spiro, an American writer and Palestinian rights activist, says that when Israel's deadly attack on Gaza is condemned , Israel's defenders often respond by saying, "Oh, right? How can you, Americans, criticize us? We are just doing what America is doing."

America has committed genocide against the indigenous people since before the founding of the United States, killing millions, looting their lands, starving, shooting and biological warfare by spreading smallpox among them, and exiling in long marches to distant reserves, this history is really similar to what is happening in Palestine now.

Between 1492 and 1900, the Native American population declined by about 90 percent, from about 60.5 million to just 6 million, Spiro cites data from the Houston Holocaust Museum.

"Indigenous people were subjected to various forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying their communities, for example, European settlers in Maine were paid for every person they killed from the Penobscot tribe," the museum's literature says, and there were repeated massacres such as the 1864 massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people at Sand Creek, in which the army killed 230 innocent people, mostly women and children.

Shortly after their arrival, European settlers began a second genocide against Africans who had been kidnapped from their homelands and brought here as slaves, and the Equal Justice Initiative states that "the transatlantic slave trade  represents one of the most violent, shocking, and terrifying eras in world history, in which nearly two million people died during the brutal Middle Passage across the ocean."

As a result, Spiro said, leaving the African continent in extreme turmoil, vulnerable to invasion and violence for centuries, the Americas became a place where race and color established a class system characterized by inequality and abuse.

While slavery officially ended after the Civil War, genocide continued with segregation, mass incarceration, bloody massacres such as in Tulsa and Greenwood, repeated lynchings without trial, discrimination in employment and housing, and police killings of black civilians, all of which are essential history that everyone should know, though it is still often denied, discouraged or prohibited from teaching.

The genocide of the indigenous peoples has not stopped or even slowed down, as in Palestine, America provides Israel or others with weapons and political cover, leaving Israel or others responsible for the actual killing. They leave or die.

Environmental extermination:

The destruction of nature by human act or negligence As in the example of deforestation, the extermination of indigenous peoples usually involves the destruction of their environment. Genocide overlaps greatly with the destruction of the environment. We can see this in the ruins of Gaza now, the destruction of its water wells, the razing of farms and cemeteries, the bombing of necessary infrastructure facilities, and 85 percent of housing and neighborhoods, but the genocide of the environment is usually less dramatic.

The widespread spraying of herbicides and plants, using "Agent Orange" on the jungles of Vietnam, with the aim of depriving Vietnamese fighters of any cover, was in itself a genocide of the population, and people, forests and fish are still dying from these poisons today.

While Indigenous peoples and slaves are dehumanized, transformed into inferior beings who can be worked to death or slaughtered, non-humans are treated as inanimate objects, corporations are deforestation, wood is used without concern about the trees or birds they sacrifice, and animals are even kept on farms within Small pens throughout her life, and then eaten without thinking about her suffering.

This is what living in a genocidal culture does with hearts and souls, you can't spend time and generations teaching society that some people are inferior and deserve to die, and then expect that their view of people and the world will not be distorted, in light of this, it is not difficult to understand where Hitler or Netanyahu came from.

Spiro examines how genocide permeates America's entire language, economy, and culture, and if this is realized, it may be possible to overcome it.

Linguistic dehumanization

The members of the Palestinian resistance or the residents of Gaza are not human beings or even fighters at all, they are always terrorists or jihadists, African Americans were not human beings as much as they were called "Negroes", "mobs", "deer", "mothers" or any other inhuman functional attributes, and the Arabs in Iraq after its occupation were called "sand negroes", and the Koreans and Vietnamese were called "thugs".

All of these were subjected to genocidal violence in America's genocidal wars, and most of these insults are still used, and Native Americans have long been described as "savages" and "scoundrels," and are now rarely mentioned as individuals at all.

Animals and plants are not only devoid of humanity, they are devoid of life, not even living, have we noticed how only humans are classified as living beings in English?

In her book Sweet Grass Braids, Native American botanist Robin Wall Kemmerer explains how most English speakers classify "things" as life forms in her native language, potawatomi, using different forms of verbs and adjectives for living things than inanimate objects, which are usually man-made and are used to describe mountains, trees, squirrels, rocks, rivers, and other living forms.

Thus Americans' perception of the world is diminished under a culture of extermination, and is harmed by the characterization of many people as subhuman, and many living beings as inanimate objects," and it would be possible to live in a much richer and more beautiful world if the language of extermination were not always conjured up to kill it.

Fan culture

In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant television drama was American Westerns and TV dramas.

In a series like Wagon Train, white settlers were seen driving the Native Americans from their land, and viewers sympathized with the settlers, the films of the time depicted settler heroes such as actor John Wayne, firing intensely over savage enemies, whom the public rarely encountered, and using gun toys, the boys would play "cowboy vs. Native American" fights for hours on end, without thinking about the terrifying origin of the game, so they grew up encouraging genocide.

Later, America's attention turned to the oppression of blacks, and detective series became a huge television production, and the reality TV show COPS, now in its 37th season, shows the police chasing bad guys, mostly African-Americans. 

Movies are no longer so bad now, but a large number of American films glorify the military that fought genocidal wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, movies like Saving Private Ryan encourage young people to volunteer for the Genocide Army, and  the Pentagon ( Department of Defense) is consulted in most of these films.

American literature is also saturated with genocide, consciously or unconsciously, and the most famous science fiction novel The  Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury describes genocide in space, when Americans arrived on Mars, killing the native inhabitants of Mars, and establishing an American-like civilization.

Capitalism and genocide

If genocide were not profitable, it would not have happened, capitalism would turn into genocide the moment it slipped out of control.

Capitalism turns everything into money, nature becomes products, people become workers and tools, writer Adam Aydek Heastie has pointed out that "under capitalism, the forest is of value only by cutting down its trees," and Eric Williams, who led the independence of Trinidad and Tobago, described in his book Capitalism and Slavery how the slave trade financed the Industrial Revolution and the massive expansion of colonialism, which was mostly genocide.

Indigenous people may live in a rainforest, but if a company can make millions by turning it into pastures that produce beef burgers, they are more likely to end up dead or try to survive in a slum.

The Palestinians have a rich culture that they seek to defend, but Trump's "bloodbath riviera" will make more money, so the people of Gaza are abandoned, it may take years or generations, but genocide is the natural result of unbridled capitalism, it may not kill everyone, but the nation whose land the capitalists want must be destroyed.

But where did the genocide get America?

In this context, Spiro and others ask, what impact does a genocide-based culture have on people in America?

The cumulative results in American society show the harshness of mass incarceration and homelessness, endless wars, rampant mental illness, violence and shootings in schools and markets, and widespread racism against target groups.

Environmental extermination and genocide distort life and put the future in grave danger, should people live in a world of inanimate objects, unable to learn from or communicate with non-human intelligence or with other human beings of different races, cultures, and religions?

What can be done?

In 2025, it seems clear that the United States , the European Union , Israel, and the Anglo-Saxon white world will continue their genocidal methods and, against the will of their people, escalate the pace of their crimes to more nihilistic and insane levels, and if left to their own desires and thinking, genocide and environmental genocide are what our leaders are doing, it is their identity, it is the source of the money and the way the system works.

Spiro asks again, "Can they be stopped? We have read to people who have some ideas, that methods of extermination should be rejected and erased at all."

Since genocide is driven by militarism, capitalism, and racism, as Martin Luther King, the leader of the civil rights movement described it in the 1960s, all of which benefit the powerful, this goal may seem impossible, but no child is born a genocide believer, children love life and experience everything alive and consciously, and if they can stop teaching them genocide, the next generation will lead us in a better direction, we can start teaching them the book of sweet grass braids, or the books of wisdom of other indigenous peoples.

DNA degeneration for extermination

In the context of denuclearizing genocide from American culture, Spiro suggests other things to do:

•    Returning the plundered lands to the natives: This has already begun, as with the Yurok people of Northern California, they have regained ownership of the lands along the rivers, and restored their natural state. 

•    Empower African Americans with greater power over their communities:  Foreign companies should be subject to local control over their operations, and local organizations should be responsible for keeping the community safe.

•    Reparations:  The federal government has provided money to Japanese citizens for the internment of their ancestors in the 1940s during the years of World War II, but not to blacks or Native American peoples, and although state and local governments and some churches have apologized and paid African Americans and some Native people for their massacres, the debts owed to Native Americans and the descendants of African slaves are enormous and have not yet been seriously addressed. Power and empowerment More than that, those affected by the genocide must pay the price.

•    American society must acknowledge its history of genocide: None of the reparations paid or apologies offered so far have changed American culture's attitude toward genocide or its accompanying environmental genocide, and this kind of reparation must be much deeper. Europeans need to learn and feel deeply the violence of American culture, and this history should be taught to children of all ages every day. At this point, America's rulers seem intent on taking the opposite position, banning what remains of teaching about racism, genocide, and bloody imperialist history.

•    Start by building a culture of care, not a culture of domination: health care and housing for all will contribute significantly to building a less violent and more rewarding society.

•    Mobilization and organizing: Most people are not aware of what has happened and is going on, you should reach out to co-workers and neighbors and share knowledge  and facts of history, join unions and activist organizations or create new ones.

•    If possible, we should arm ourselves and learn to shoot: learn safety skills and handle weapons, non-violence is always better, of course, but we are faced with those who are killing Gaza now, and those who are bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima, they are not playing and they have never changed.