Evil is rarely a solo project. Horrors and atrocities of the past may provide context for the horrors and atrocities happening right now in Gaza and the Congo.
United States war crimes: Gosh, where to begin? Widespread rape by U.S. servicemen of Japanese, German, and French women; human experiments on non-white U.S. enlisted men “to see how non-white races would react to being mustard gassed;” mass murders and torture in Vietnam, including burning “the membrane of the throats of Vietnamese children and holes in their stomachs by feeding them trioxane heat tablets in the middle of peanut butter cracker sandwiches from their rations” (you know, like you do); My Lai; Abu Ghraib; mass killings and torture of Haitians, including hanging prisoners by their genitals; and so much more. We, the good guys, did this shit. And these are only the crimes we know about.
Operation Paperclip: Immediately after WWII, the U.S. hired more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, many of them former members (and several of them former leaders) of the Nazi Party. Nice resumes, fellas, come work for us. The Paperclip scientists won major awards in the U.S. for their advancements in aeronautics, and were hugely influential in the U.S. space program. Occasionally, one of the ex-Nazis was discovered to have done something especially heinous during his days in Germany. Never fear, the U.S. made sure to protect him. For instance, in 1951, Walter Schreiber was linked to human experiments conducted by Kurt Bloom at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The U.S. military helped Schreiber emigrate to Argentina, to escape punishment for his crimes. Nice.
American cover-up of Japaneses war crimes: Although institutional racism made white European ex-Nazis more attractive to U.S. hiring teams than their Japanese counterparts, America was nonetheless willing to do favors for Japanese officials accused of crimes against humanity. Thus, immediately after the war, the occupying U.S. force deliberately covered up Japanese war crimes—including human experimentation that had been carried out on Chinese prisoners. Hey, we did it in Tuskegee, why shouldn’t the Japanese do it in China?
Operation Bloodstone: The CIA hired high-ranking Nazi intelligence agents who’d committed war crimes to spy for us inside the Soviet Union, Latin America, Canada, and even domestically within the United States. Hey, why not.
Happy Holidays! Pray for peace and forgiveness.
