Published by The Wire on August 27, 2024
The US secretary of state's genocide memorial tweet is a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of supreme hypocrisy.
On August 24, in the midst of the US-financed genocide in Gaza by Israel, and on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya people, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tweeted:
“Today marks the seventh anniversary of the Burma military’s genocide and crimes against humanity targeting Rohingya. The United States continues to honour the victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities.”
His tweet received 1 million views on X though it is impossible to see how many viewers take the American diplomat seriously. But, most certainly, students of “hypocrisy” will find Blinken’s genocide memorial tweet a Zombie-esque, self-unaware act of “supreme hypocrisy”, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s characterisation of a quintessentially American feature of Pax Americana.
In fact, such acts of supreme hypocrisy are an exclusive and special characteristic of all colonisers that hailed from the old Europe (and its white settler colonial offshoots). More so in the case of the United States, whose Declaration of Independence thundered as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” while in the same breath, the same venerable statement openly dehumanise as “Savages” the native peoples from whom America’s “founding fathers” stole vast swathes of lands to build a permanent settler colonial state.
On August 25, the Rohingyas commemorated the seventh anniversary of their own “Never again!”. Nearly eight decades after the total defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, and the end of the Nazis’ genocidal colonial project, everyone in their right mind is painfully cognisant of the moral emptiness of this post-Holocaust promise.
There have been dozens of recurring cases of genocide during the 79 years since the closure of the Nazi’s main site of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Recurring, because the leading nations of the world with veto or dictatorial power at the United Nations have either been incapable of preventing crimes against humanity, including the crime of genocide, or, worse still, have been directly and indirectly involved in these organised horror shows worldwide.
As a matter of historical record, Blinken’s own United States has played an instrumental role in several genocides and other crimes against humanity in my own Asian neighbourhoods, as well as throughout Latin America. Enter Indonesia under Suharto, the American War in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and Ecuador, to name just some of the well-documented cases of US-enabled, financed or patronised atrocity crimes.
Vietnam War, 1972. Photo: Raymond Depardon/manhhai/flickr CC BY 2.0
When I was a young academic in a teacher education university in Chicago some 25 years ago, I became friends with an African-American gentleman, a generation older than me, who was in charge of the university’s postal services. With a detectable air of pained bitterness, he recounted his experience as a US veteran of the Vietnam War. In his words, which came to be etched in my memory after so many years, “You know we (black men) were sent to Vietnam (by the US government) and told that we were there to defend democracy and freedom. Then we came home, and we were told, ‘you can’t eat sandwich at this counter or drink coffee at that table.”
He wryly laughed at what he painfully experienced as stomach-turning American hypocrisy.
Likewise, a decade ago in Phnom Penh, I heard live from the public gallery an angry complaint about official American hypocrisy from a radically different type of character.
Sitting inside the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, with its bullet-proof glass wall, in his closing statement, the Pol Pot regime’s Brother Number Two, Noun Chea asked, in effect, why American policymakers (for instance, Henry Kissinger who was considered a key architect of the carpet bombing of Indochina, specifically Northern Cambodia along the Vietnamese-Khmer borders) were not in the defendant’s dock, along with him.
By throwing millions of US taxpayer money into establishing a genocide documentation post facto, a UN-Cambodia hybrid criminal court, and running it for over 10 years, the United States had by then washed its official blood-stained hands in Cambodia’s bloody civil war of which the emergence of the genocidal Pol Pot regime was a devastating outcome.
To belabour the obvious, Blinken is not responsible for what the early crop of European genocidal settlers – euphemistically framed as “founding fathers” – did to the Indigenous populations of the United States, nor the carpet-bombing of Indochina (Laos, Northern Cambodia and Vietnam) during the undeclared war fought in the name of “the defence of freedom”. That last American “big war” in Asia claimed the lives of millions of humans on both sides of the conflict: nearly 3 million Vietnamese and 86,000 American troops, and left many more millions, deeply wounded, psychologically and physically.
But, in his capacity as US Secretary of State, running the “Israel, right or wrong” policy, Blinken certainly is amongst a sizeable pool of genocide enablers, including US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British PM Sir Keir Starmer, EU External Affairs Chief Ursula von der Leyen who have been aiding and abetting Israel’s ongoing genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, under Tel Aviv’s openly announced “total siege”.
Against US President Joe Biden’s apparent mental incapacity to lead or manage US foreign policy, specifically, the US policy towards Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza and the blatantly illegal and expansionist land grab in the Occupied Territories in West Bank, Blinken is not merely executing orders to supply the state of Israel with additional two dozen billion dollars worth of weapons such as 1,000 to 2,000-ton bombs, advanced killing machines such as fighter-bombers, drones, etc., but rather as a self-proclaimed Zionist, Blinken is personally and officially involved in Israel’s “physical destruction” of the Palestinian people, in the name of the settler coloniser-occupier’s “self-defence”.
Like the Rohingya, the Palestinians in Gaza (and all the Occupied Territories) have been declared by the UN’s highest court and principal judicial organ – the International Court of Justice – “a protected group” under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
So, for Blinken as the official who is calling the shots on US policy towards Israel, to publicly declare that “the United States continues to honour the [Rohingya] victims and stand with the survivors as they seek justice and accountability for these atrocities”, is, in my view, more than an act of hypocrisy.
Ordinary citizens and individuals often act in ways that qualify as hypocritical. But men like Blinken with an extraordinary amount of institutional power – to ship, or not to ship, billions of dollars worth of weapons to a state, which by all indications, is engaged in the “physical destruction” of a human population under occupation – cannot be considered simply “hypocritical”. The words hypocrisy and hypocritical just won’t do.
As a matter of fact, our network of Asian scholar activists – the Forces of Renewal SouthEast Asia – has recently published former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammad’s 10-point statement, which he titled “hypocrisy”. In it, the world’s oldest statesman listed key US crimes and pointed out Washington’s complicity in global crimes, past and present while focusing on the present American financing and direct involvement in Israel’s genocide.
Mahathir is not alone in seeing through the American fog of liberal propaganda framed in the discourses of “rule of law”, “accountability”, “rule-based world order”, and other grandiose statements. From his deathbed, the late Harold Pinter, the renowned British playwright, devoted half of his acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize for Literature, urging the world to begin taking stock of the worldwide crimes of the United States.
Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest thinkers and activists alive today – albeit sadly in a state of paralysis – has publicly characterised his own native country as “Number One Rogue State”. The tweet Blinken sent out on the eve of the Rohingya genocide anniversary is beyond hypocrisy. It reflects the quintessentially American disease, which the psychologically inclined among us might call schizophrenia.
The legally informed, on the other hand, would see Blinken’s tweet as Kafkaesquely criminal. For one can’t be involved in one case of genocide (Israel) while at the same time demanding accountability and justice for victims in another (Myanmar).
Maung Zarni is a Co-founder of the Forces of Renewal South East Asia (www.forsea.co). He has had more than 30 years of experience in international affairs around Myanmar’s democratisation. He is the author of Myanmar’s Enemy of the State Speaks and co-author of Essays on Myanmar’s Genocide of Rohingyas.
