Gideon Polya,“The Sounds of Silence, 2008. Olympic Hype, Holocaust Denial & Genocide Denial“, MWC News, 13 August 2008.
The Sounds of Silence, 2008. Olympic Hype, Holocaust Denial & Genocide Denial
The World was amazed by the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and is now enthusiastically absorbed with the achievements of marvellous top athletes – which athlete gained gold by getting there 0.01 second faster and a deluge of other such sporting statistics. However the statistics that are not reported by Mainstream media either during the Olympic Games, or at any other time for that matter, are those relating to global avoidable mortality (excess mortality, excess death, avoidable death, deaths that should not have happened) e.g. the estimated 44,000 people (26,000 of them under-5 year old infants) who die avoidably each day due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease.
Indeed a Google Search for the phrases “avoidable mortality” and its synonyms “excess mortality”, “excess death” and “avoidable death” (all important medical epidemiological terms) yield about 25,000 to 250,000 URLs whereas “Olympic Games” yields 110 million and “War on Terra” (in horrible actuality an obscene War for Oil and a cowardly, racist War on Arab, Muslim, Asian and Non-European Women and Children) yields 14.5 million.
The Olympic hype has not been seriously diminished by the concurrent, genocidal invasion of South Ossetia by the US- and Apartheid Israeli-trained Georgian military and the counter-invasion of Georgia by Russian forces (the beginning of a new Cold War, the beginning of a new Asian war by the Zionists, Bush-ites and neo-Bush-ites?).
Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) has been deservedly much criticized for his silence during the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust but his holocaust ignoring and genocide ignoring was part of a much wider and indeed still continuing culture of entrenched holocaust ignoring and genocide ignoring. Thus the whole World is familiar with the horrors of the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust (6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) but the World War 2 Western Theatre Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Roma dead) is largely ignored. The Eastern Theatre World War 2 Holocausts in Japanese-occupied China (35 million dead) and in British-occupied India (6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British in the man-made Bengal Famine) are still overwhelmingly ignored by the perpetrators, Western historians and the World in general.
Holocaust Ignoring and Genocide Ignoring – effectively Holocaust Denial and Genocide Denial – are entrenched in a world that simply wants to “look the other way”. Mainstream media, politicians, corporations and academics simply do not want to know and have entrenched a world culture of denial and ignoring. Yet the horrible data from the UN Population Division and the medical literature will not go away – about 44,000 people will die avoidably today (about 26,000 being under-5 year old infants), and tomorrow, and the next day …
40 years ago the Web did not exist and I did not have ready access to UN demographic data. However as an Australian biochemistry PhD student in 1968 I had enough appreciation of Humanity, history and cause-and-effect to drive around with the following big anti-war protest sign on my Volkswagen: “NAZIS KILLED JEWS – WE KILL ASIANS”.
Paradoxically the 1960s were a time of hope and change as evidenced by de-colonization, anti-war and civil rights protests, anti-racism and personal liberation. However, as argued in a recent article “America, Zionism, Israel and the 1968-2008 Orwellian Transformation“ (see: http://www.stateofnature.org/americaZionismIsrael.html ), the last 40 years have seen increasingly entrenched politically correct racism (PC racism) and lying by omission and commission in the Western Murdochracies: "1968 was also the year in which the US abstained from Security Council Resolution 252, demanding Israeli withdrawal from conquered Arab lands, and therein lies a malignancy that has spread to threaten the whole world in 2008." .
Back then in the middle 1960s we were deeply moved by the song “The Sounds of Silence” about emptiness, alienation and not-saying. This song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel was released in 1966 (see: http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/americandreams/soundsofsilence.htm ) and was used in the seminal film “The Graduate” (1967: http://www.filmsite.org/grad.html ). The lyrics are as applicable in 2008 as in 1968:
Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain,
Still remains, within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'neath the halo of a street lamp, I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night, and touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw, Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening,
People writing songs, that voices never share.
And no one dared, Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I, "You do not know, Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you, Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed, In the wells of silence.
And the people bowed and prayed, To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning, In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls." and whisper'd in the sounds of silence.
In 2007 I published a book entitled “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ) in which I reported estimates from UN Population Division data of avoidable death for every country in the World since 1950. My intuitive mid-1960s estimation that something appalling was going on in US-devastated Indo-China was borne out by analysis of the mortality statistics 40 years later: excess deaths in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam associated with the US Indo-China War totalled 13 million.
Analysis of the latest UN Population Division data and medical literature data yielded the following mid-2008 estimates about avoidable mortality in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories - post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million, 2 million, and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; refugees totalling 7 million, 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively) (see: http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261 ).
“Holocaust” is an appropriate descriptive for events involving huge mortality. However when such huge mortality is race- or religion-specific and involves sustained, deliberate, remorseless abuse of humanity, “Holocaust” also becomes "Genocide" as defined precisely by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ): "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The continuing Palestinian Holocaust, Iraqi Holocaust, Afghan Holocaust – the continuing Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide as defined above – are overwhelmingly ignored by global media, corporations, politicians, academics and writers. Apart from myself, as far as I know the only writers on Earth (population 6.6 billion) actually referring to the Iraqi Holocaust and/or the Iraqi Genocide are Dr Mark Weissbrot (Just Foreign Policy), Dr Paul Craig Roberts (Father of Reaganomics), John Pilger (outstanding Australian-UK writer) and Tariq Ali (outstanding Pakistani-UK writer). Apart from myself, as far as I know, the only scholar referring to the Afghan Genocide is US law professor Ali Khan.
The Sounds of Silence indeed.
Dear Reader, you must know of great men and women and, through “six degrees of separation”, know people who know people, who know people … who know great men and women. Please do your bit to ensure that important men and women speak out about the continuing massacre of the innocents and are prepared to use terms appropriate to the remorseless, criminal, racist carnage – Holocaust and Genocide.