30 August 2020 — Anti-Empire

And sentenced to death millions more

In the run up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, all you could hear about was how Saddam had “gassed his own people” — a reference to up to 5,000 Iraqi Kurds killed in the 1988 Halabja chemical attack when Saddam was still being propped up by the Empire.

I guess that was meant to evoke parallels to Hitler, as well as focus attention specifically on crimes against own populace. Sure, the US had strangled to death 1 million Iraqis, but that Saddam had done it to his own citizens is what made his much more modest body count uniquely evil.

The morality of assigning lesser weight to mass murder of foreigners aside, it is true that by 2003 it seemed the time of governments inflicting truly massive mortality on their own populations, which left such a terrible mark on the 20th century, was behind us.

Sure, post-WWII the Empire had extinguished a few million in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. But these, as said, were populaces of foreign governments. The last such government democide of own subjects was the 1.5 million who perished 1975-79 under the Kmer Rouge, and before that the 45 million in Mao’s 1958-62 Great Leap Forward. For even earlier death-by-government with body counts in the millions you’d have to go back to Stalin’s famines and terror, and to those of Churchill (if you count the Crown’s subjects in British India as Churchill’s “own people”).

Thus until now, we lived in an age where we believed that albeit — courtesy of Empire’s worst excesses — the wholesale slaughter and strangulation of foreigners was still with us, at least the terrible 20th-century style strangulation of own citizens no longer was.

In 2020 that no longer holds true.

According to one estimate 21,000 Britons died during just the first eight weeks of the lockdown as a result of the lockdown. Another study puts it at a more modest 16,000.

According to the London government itself up to 185,000 more are expected to die in the coming years as a result of the 2020 lockdown. A different study puts it at a more modest 85,000.

Whether it is 21,000 and 185,000, or 16,000 and 85,000 these are huge figures. And while Britain’s lockdown was the longest in the West, the UK is just one small part of the developed world that locked down. For the entire developed world combined the losses are easily ten (if not twenty) times greater.

These are largely deaths stemming from the fact that for months on end the life-saving and life-extending health care systems essentially shut down (albeit they absolutely didn’t need to), and heart and cancer patients in particular are going to pay the price.

In the Third World, only a small sliver of the population has access to advanced heart and cancer treatments to begin with, so the shutdowns were less consequential in that way, but they are going to pay for the lockdowns in increases in tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.

By one estimate due to the lockdowns, an extra 128,000 children are going to die of malnutrition just through the end of 2020. WHO estimates there will be an up to 1.4 million additional tuberculosis deaths, up to 380,000 additional malaria deaths, and up to 500,000 additional HIV deaths.

When all is said and done we are talking between 2 and 5 million (!) people sentenced to death by their own governments. Nothing like this has been seen since the days of Pol Pot and Mao.

At least Pol Pot and Mao were deranged megalomaniacs who were building a “paradise” on Earth, and to them this justified sacrificing millions if necessary. The world governments of 2020, however, sacrificed millions because of what??? Because there was a worse-than-usual flu bug running around in the age of social media??

Apparently in 2020 millions have been condemned to death because governments all over the world got it in their head they could order around a virus (talk about utopianism even greater than Mao’s), and proceeded to sacrifice millions in a process that ultimately proved only how incapable they were of this, even after such a horrific cost.

Over 1 million Iraqis perished under the ruinous 1990-2003 sanctions regime. But in the alternative media, we are acutely aware even less comprehensive sanctions against other countries also always result in a certain amount of excess deaths, eg the tens of thousands calculated for Venezuela and Iran.

Despite that, faced with the novelty of mapped virus movement in the age of social media, ignorant governments all over the world responded by decreeing the equivalent of Iraq sanctions on steroids against their own populations. What before 2020 governments sought to do only to their enemies to weaken and destroy them, they now unleashed against their own populations as a “cure”.

If before 2020 sanctions were something only people in sufficiently “rogue” states had to contend with, and then only as a threat from foreign, explicitly hostile governments, in 2020 such strangulation became a threat, and reality, to everyone. Courtesy of their own governments, and with the same ruinous and murderous outcome in lives lost.

And this is why Anti-Empire has been covering and speaking out against the lockdowns so much. Anti-Empire speaks out against wars and blockades of the American Empire, not because they are American, but because they the biggest waste of life today. So when another man-made mass casualty event comes along that if anything is right now taking even more lives, then we can not do anything but fight just as strongly against that too.

Sadly however, one half of the independent media which opposed Imperial sanctions on small powers and was always calling attention to their cost, is now shilling for very similar measures all over the world, as long as they are inflicted on the populace by the local oppressor rather than the far-away one. Apparently sanctions are good after all, and they even cure viruses? Maybe John Bolton’s Lenin Peace Prize got lost in the mail?