Innocence in the Time of Cholera

Innocence in the Time of Cholera
By Gabriele Zamparini

And finally cholera broke out in Baghdad.

Nothing to worry about of course! The New York Times won’t ruin your breakfast and the BBC will respect your supper. Too much violence on TV already; better protect the child within our sophisticated intellect from these unnecessary details. Nobody needs to know those 1.2 million Iraqi deaths as a result of the illegal war of aggression in 2003. Numbers don’t count, do they?

What a formidable instrument is our brain. We can’t deal with the responsibility of genocide so denial becomes a self-defense instinct, at least for those still in good faith. But are we really innocent?

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. He recently wrote:

“The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife. It is amazing to think that this has occurred in what was only recently a liberal and civilized country by the region’s standards. This was a country that had a problem with immigration, particularly among the well-educated and talented classes. They went to Iraq because it was the closest Arab proxy to Western-style society that one could find in the area. It was the US that turned this country into a killing field. Why won’t we face this? Why won't we take responsibility?”

Rockwell titles his denounce, None Dare Call It Genocide

Maybe the time has come for all of us to put aside our worn out ideological uniforms and to make alliances with all those willing to take responsibility for this abomination unleashed in our name, with our money, from leaders we elected and re-elected.

Maybe it’s time to look into the mirror the great American writer James Baldwin gave us many years ago:

"[T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. (…) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime."

I repeat my call, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon must speak out. Silence is complicity.