As a student of American history I can’t help but notice the striking similarity between what is going on today in Gaza and what went on some 160 years ago in the U.S. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln thanked his naval commander, Gustavus Fox, for helping him dupe the South Carolina Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter by placing warships in Charleston Harbor. No one was harmed let alone killed by the bombing of the fort, but Lincoln used it as an excuse to send an initial 75,000-man army to invade eleven Southern states and wage total war on the civilian population for four years.
Today we are supposed to believe that Israel’s vaunted Mossad, assisted by the CIA and the massive American “intelligence community,” the Pentagon, and the entire might of the U.S. military-industrial complex, was totally surprised by Palestinians on motor bikes and on foot who easily and conveniently broke through the “impregnable” barriers into Israel. According to news reports, it was as easy as with the January 6, 2021 protesters who, after being invited in by the police, entered the U.S. Capitol building. The motor bike riding Palestinians did some barbaric and reprehensible things, randomly shooting and killing hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens (although there is now evidence that many of the Israeli victims were victims of “friendly fire” by their own military). As the entire world now knows, the government of Israel, like Lincoln, used this event as a reason to wage total war on all Palestinians in Gaza, women and children included.
By the mid nineteenth century international law had evolved to the point where everyone understood that intentionally targeting civilians was a war crime that deserved the severest of punishments, and such punishments did occur. Lincoln single handedly turned all of that on its head by waging total war on the civilian population of the South from the very beginning of his war. Indeed, his initial war plan was called “the Anaconda plan” because it sought to surround and blockade the entire South and literally starve out its population by depriving it of food, medicine, and much else. American court historians such as James McPherson and Stephen Oates have used words like “brilliant” and “an act of genius” to describe the waging of war on Southern civilians by the U.S. Army (with the help of thousands of new immigrants from Europe).
McPherson has written that some 50,000 Southern civilians, women and children included, were killed by Lincoln’s armies. Coming from James McPherson that is probably a gross underestimate. Today’s population is more than ten times what it was in the 1860s, so that would be the equivalent of the U.S. government today murdering more than 500,000 American citizens. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, all of this mass killing and the destruction of entire cities was said to have created a “treasury of virtue” within the U.S. government, so much so that whatever the government did in the future would be, by definition, virtuous because it was the U.S. government that was doing it. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the quip by General Sherman that “war is hell.” That is meant to tell the public to just shut up about all the war crimes that Sherman committed. To the extent that the public does shut up, it makes it more likely that such crimes will be repeated over and over, as they have been.
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/04/thomas-dilorenzo/palestinian-confederates/
