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The phrase "collective responsibility" is
rather pleasant sounding, with its implication that, perhaps, we should all collectively
take responsibility for our own actions. What parents should not teach their
children such things? But for at least the past 150 years "collective
responsibility" also has a specific meaning with regard to U.S. military
policy. In the military context, "collective responsibility" is a
euphemism for the mass murder of innocent civilians. It is a phrase that was
used by General William Tecumseh Sherman himself, long preceding
today’s nonchalant dismissal of the murder of civilians in foreign countries
as "collateral damage."
The idea is that if the U.S is at war with another
nation it is not only the combatants who are legitimate "targets"
but all inhabitants of the "enemy nation," women, children, the disabled,
everyone. As such, it is the primary cause of "blowback," or
retaliation for the intentional murder of noncombatants by the U.S. military.
It is common sense to expect the people of other countries to retaliate for
such atrocities, even committing acts of terrorism against us. But most
Americans seem to be so brainwashed in the lies and propaganda of
"American Exceptionalism" (the idea that
whatever foreign policy the U.S. pursues is virtuous by virtue of the fact
that it is the U.S. foreign policy) that they simply cannot imagine
why anyone from any foreign country would want to harm us. In their ignorance
they are prone to believe such fantasies and absurdities as the theory that
Middle East terrorists attacked us on 9/11 because they hate the idea of
freedom.
William Tecumseh Sherman was indeed the founding
father of terrorism perpetrated by the U.S. government and disquised by the language of "collective
security." Sherman biographer William Fellman
(author of Citizen Sherman) quotes Sherman as saying this about his fellow
American citizens from the Southern states: "To the petulant and
persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she
is disposed of the better . . . . Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is
useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and
people will cripple their military resources" (emphasis added).
Sherman was referring here to his plans for the civilian population of
Georgia after the Confederate Army had left the state.
Referring to his plans for the civilian population
of Northern Alabama, Fellman quotes Sherman as
saying that the "Government of the United States" had the
"right" to "take their lives, their homes, their
lands, their everything . . . . We will take every life, every acre of land,
every particle of property . . . " And he was
not referring to slaves when he used the word "property."
In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman wrote
that "the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers
alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people . . . . There
is a class of people, men, women, and children, who must be killed .
. ." (emphasis added).
In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were
firing at U.S. Navy gunboats on the Mississippi River. Unable to apprehend the
combatants, Sherman took revenge on the civilian population by burning the
entire town of Randolph, Tennessee to the ground. In the spring of 1863,
after the Confederate Army had evacuated, Sherman ordered the destruction of
Jackson, Mississippi. Afterwards, in a letter to Grant Sherman boasted that
"The inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is
devastated for 30 miles around."
Sherman’s troops also destroyed Meridian,
Mississippi after Confederate troops were driven out, after which Sherman
wrote to Grant: "For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and
with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in
pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists."
When Sherman’s chief military engineer,
Captain O.M. Poe, advised that the bombing of Atlanta after the Confederates
had fled was of no military significance, Sherman ignored him and declared
that the corpses of women and children in the streets was "a beautiful
sight," as Fellman writes in Citizen
Sherman.
In October of 1864 Sherman ordered the murder of
randomly-chosen citizens in retaliation for Confederate Army attacks on his
army. He wrote to General Louis Watkins: "Cannot you send over about
Fairmount and Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses . . . , kill a few at
random, and let them know that it will be repeated every time a [military]
train is fired upon . . . " (See John B. Walters, Merchant of Terror: General
Sherman and Total War, p. 137).
Two months after the formal end of the war, Sherman
was placed in charge of the Military District of the Missouri, which was all
land west of the Mississippi. His assignment was to commence a war of
genocide against the Plains Indians, primarily to make way for the
government-subsidized transcontinental railroads. Lincoln’s personal
friend, General Grenville Dodge, was the chief engineer of the project and
recommended that slaves be made of the Indians, who could then be forced to
dig the railroad beds from Iowa to California. Government policy was to
attempt to murder as many of the Plains Indians instead, women and children
included, and Sherman was the natural choice as the director of such an
enterprise.
Fellman quotes Sherman’s marching orders as the
following (p. 26): "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the
Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women and children"
(emphasis added). Fellman writes that Sherman
"had given [General] Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many
women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates
felt was necessary." "The more Indians we can kill this
year, the less will have to be killed next year," Sherman wrote to
Sheridan. By 1890 the U.S. Army murdered as many as 60,000 Indians, placing
the survivors in concentration camps known as "reservations."
As Murray Rothbard once
wrote, all government power rests ultimately on a series of myths and
superstitions about the alleged magnificence of the state and its leaders and
henchmen (and of corollary myths about the "evils" of the civil
society). Americans will continue to be duped into supporting
unconstitutional wars of aggression – and to be the victims of blowback
– as long as they are conned into believing that such monsters and
psychopathic killers as William Tecumseh Sherman are secular saints and
heroes.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Aricle originally published on www.LewRockwell.com. By authorization
of the author
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