Sukumaran C. V.
If and when we hear the news of a bomb blast in Bangalore or Hyderabad or Delhi or Mumbai; we are not shocked, because we know that it happens in India quite often. Bomb blast in Karachi or Islamabad; we are not shocked. We know it happens in Pakistan. Bomb blast in Kabul; there is nothing to be shocked. If a bomb explodes in Baghdad and kills many, nobody is shocked. If a psychopath enters into a school in the U. S. and shoots and kills many students and teachers, we are not surprised; because we know that it happens in the U. S. intermittently. But on hearing the news of the bomb blasts in the Boston Marathon; we are shocked. We are shocked because the scourge called terrorist blast has shattered the immunity of the strongest nation also! That means terrorism can’t be contained by military power or police force, however impregnable it may be. We are shocked not because that we love the U. S.
Nobody who knows the true history of the U. S. can love that nation. The nation has been built by slaughtering the Native Americans en masse. The nation has been built on the sweat and blood of the Native Africans. The nation has enriched itself by looting the resources of the people all over the world. The nation has killed more people in the world than any other nation has ever had been able to kill in the whole history of the humankind.
The Native Americans ‘were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality and their belief in sharing.’ This is how the ancestors of the U. S. dealt with them:
“Among the Arawak Indians, mass suicides began with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250, 000 Indians on Haiti were dead…The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes: deliberate attacks on noncombatants…Captain John Mason proposed to avoid attacking the Indian warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”
This is how the U. S. has transported the Negroes: “They were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”
This is how the U. S. has devastated Vietnam: “By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were 20 million bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth….On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Nagai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death…It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people—most of them women, children and old people—had been slain and buried there….Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings told reporters in early 1971: ‘Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.’” (All the quoted passages are from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States).
And we know what the U. S. has done to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Boston bombings are gruesome, but gruesome is a milder word to describe the U. S. cruelties on the Native Americans, the Negroes, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, of Chile, of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is high time the U. S. and the world learnt that violence breeds violence and we can’t reap love and co-operation by sowing violence and injustice.
