Got this in my inbox from Bill Mandel (links added):
Over half a century ago, in 1951, I traveled the country publicizing and selling "WE CHARGE GENOCIDE," a book-length petition to the United Nations compiled under the direction of William L. Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress.
I write in my autobiography that he "occupies the chronological space between W.E.B. DuBois," who I also had the honor to know, "and Martin Luther King as leader of the struggle for civil rights. Patterson is forgotten because he was a Communist to the end of his days. He was impressed by the way I conducted myself in the South during the Martinsville Case, and asked me to promote the book to Black leadership, where his name was then an open sesame" because he had organized the successful decades-long battle to save the Scottsboro Nine from death, "and to such whites as could be reached, primarily people in those Left-led labor unions that had not yet been smashed.
"Americans had been brainwashed into believing that genocide means only mass murder. In fact, the UN Genocide Convention reads: 'In the present Convention, genocide means ANY of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole OR IN PART, a national, ethnical, 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", as in Australia. [emphasis added by Bill Mandel].
"Every time a cop kills a Black when he would not kill a white, that is genocide: killing MEMBERS of a group. For that reason, the U.S. Senate, led by Southern die-hards, refused to ratify the Genocide Convention for nearly forty years. The American Bar Association was a major ally, saying frankly that indictments could be brought within the United States if it were ratified. Now ratified, it is part of the law of this country."
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What a beautiful legacy. You know, Malcolm X, in one of the speeches he gave in his latter years called for Blacks in the United States to appeal to their allies in Africa, Asia, and within the colored nations in the U.N. to thus bring charges against the United States in the World Court. I asked Angela Davis at one point what ever happened to this effort, or if anyone ever took up this cause. I definitely would like to know.
Ben, I have found it hard to read and link to some of your posts because your expressions of anger make it hard for people (e.g., me) to take in the information as information (i.e., as reliable data). So, you lose me early on in that post about that “genocidal policy” of the Red Cross. Though I didn’t see comments on it, I assume that’s what prompted this poston genocide.
1. It’s difficult enough to convince (enough/many) Americans that the Red Cross is messing up. (Or, as in text above, that a police officer is messing up.)
2. It’s certainly a difficult case to make that federal (or local) failures in disaster preparation and response have a racist aspect. In order to do this, (1) it’s important to lay out exactly what is meant by racism. Because there are different types of racist conduct, e.g. institutionalized racism is quite different than a hate crime. In particular, different types of racism implicate different degrees of willful / deliberate intent and of ideology. (2) Then, I think people can hear/read the argument better if the evidence is presented in a fairly factual and NPOV (neutral point of view) manner. Without labelling the evidence by the conclusion lechatkhila (at the outset). (3) The evidence needs to show not just a pattern of discrimation, unless the conclusion is limited to something like institutionalized racism, but also intent. For that purpose, it’s helpful to explain what grounds can support an argument about intent. E.g., the use of racist ideology, texts that arguably show intent, actions in the face of warnings etc.
3. Genocide requires INTENT to destroy a group. I think “in whole or in part” conveys something like a criminal’s forethought that, e.g., “considering that we can’t kill all the Jupiterians, I’ll settle for killing 10,000 of them.” Surely, “destroy…in part… a group” does not cover the intent to kill an individual, no matter how racist/ anti-Semitic/ homophobic etc. the intent. Otherwise, genocide would be collapsed to the meaning of violent racism/etc. As horrible as is anti-ABCism violence, genocide is a crime of a different scale. So, it seems patently incorrect to assert “Every time a cop kills a Black when he would not kill a white, that is genocide: killing MEMBERS of a group.” (In other words, the statement presupposes something about all cops that is not shared, I think, by most readers. E.g., what if it’s a black cop? On the other hand, the statement would be more plausible about a KKK member, because we may assume that lynchings were rooted in an intent and ideology to destroy a group.)
4. Where is there any evidence that the Red Cross has the intent to destroy a group? Absent better evidence, the “genocide” language is inflammatory and defamatory.
You can be sure that I love your blog and the information you are providing is terribly, terribly important. Plus, you are covering the story in a comprehensive way. But I’m reluctant to link to these posts because of characterizations that are too quick for the readers, and here too explosive and wrong (e.g. genocidal). Please reconsider.
Respectully, your admiring reader,
Kaspit