On April 12, U.S. President Joe Biden said the atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine amounted to "genocide."

Genocide refers to acts committed with intent to destroy—in whole or in part—a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, especially killing them off or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions calculated to bring about its destruction. These are crimes against humanity of an egregious order. Whether true or not, this charge by Biden could be used as part of “making a case” to escalate U.S. involvement in the war or even enter into the war directly—or, it could be perceived by Russia as a threat to do so. In a conflict between militaries that have 10,000 nukes between them, and with the U.S. being the only country to actually use nuclear weapons (against civilians in Japan at the end of World War 2), the charge intensifies the danger of a nuclear war that could mean the end of human civilization.

At this point, neither Biden nor the State Department have articulated specific charges of genocide against Russia (charges which, if the U.S. attempted to bring them, would shine a light on the fact that the U.S. refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Rome Convention and the International Criminal Court which define and enforce international law against genocide).

But since Biden made the charge, it is fair to ask: Is the United States in fact a principled opponent of genocide? Or, has it committed genocide on a scale far beyond its nearest competitor?

The crime of genocide was articulated at the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which took place as part of the founding of the United Nations (UN), in the wake of global horror at the Nazi genocide against Jews and other groups in Europe. The Convention defined genocide as any act which is committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. By that definition, the United States is guilty of genocide on an unparalleled scale, including the near extermination of the Native peoples in North America, the slaughter of millions during the Vietnam War, and U.S. sanctions against the people of Iraq.

Genocide Against the Native Americans

Genocide against the Native Americans is at the foundation of the United States of America. In 1779, George Washington led over 6,000 U.S. troops to attack the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York. Their mission, ordered by Washington, was:

[T]otal destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. (See Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, Jeffrey Ostler, p. 72.)

General John Sullivan’s troops methodically looted and destroyed Iroquois towns and villages, destroying a million bushels of corn, tens of thousands of bushels of vegetables and ten thousand fruit trees. (See American Crime Case #90: The Sullivan Expedition, 1779—Genocide of Native Peoples and Scorched Earth in Upstate New York.)

President Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal Act” led to the forced march from 1838-1839 of approximately 15,000 Cherokee. They were marched 800 miles to what is now Oklahoma. "On that march, it has been estimated that 2,500-4,000 people died. That seven-month march has become known as The Trail of Tears." (For more see American Crime Case #44: The Trail of Tears, 1838-39.)

From 1846 into the late-1870s, some 130,000 Native American lives were snuffed out in California—what was 80 percent of the Native population in 1846—through massacres, murders, starvation, and disease carried out by the American military and American settlers.

Beginning in the 1870s and lasting a century or more, 150,000 Native Americans were torn from their families and forced to attend boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their Native languages, were forced to abandon their Native beliefs and take up Christianity. (For more see American Crime Case #40: Native American Boarding Schools: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”.)

And these are just a few of the horrendous crimes committed against Native Americans as a people… crimes which continue to this day. If Biden wants to open his mouth about genocide, let him start here.

Genocide in Vietnam

For nearly 15 years, with the objective of crushing a popular revolutionary insurgency against imperialist domination, the U.S. waged a war against Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of millions of people in that and neighboring countries. The My Lai massacre was emblematic of U.S. genocidal war fighting doctrine.

On Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, 100 soldiers from Charlie Company, U.S. Army Americal Division, entered this small hamlet in Vietnam’s countryside. “It was just like any other Vietnamese village—old papa-sans, women and kids,” a soldier said.

“The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village.” Another soldier later testified: “It was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners.” “I began shooting them all. I guess I shot maybe 25 or 20 people in the ditch,” one G.I. later recounted, “men, women, and children. And babies.” (See American Crime Case #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968—The My Lai Massacre.)

Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, documented that killings like this “were no accident or aberration. They were instead the result of command policies that turned wide swaths of the Mekong Delta [a region in Vietnam] into ‘free-fire zones’ in a relentless effort to achieve a high body count.”

In 1972, the “Christmas bombing” of Vietnam decimated the city of Hanoi as well as its nearby seaport and industrial center of Haiphong. Dikes protecting civilians from flooding were bombed, hospitals, shopping areas, homes, housing complexes, factories, and diplomatic missions were destroyed (see American Crime Case #34: America’s 1972 Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam.) And the U.S. extended this genocidal slaughter to the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, where the U.S. dropped at least half a million tons of bombs including napalm—jellied gasoline that sticks to and burns—literally fries—human skin, along with cluster bombs that tear off human limbs, organs, torsos or heads. (See American Crime Case #47: The Bombing of Cambodia, 1969-1973.) 

Genocide Against the People of Iraq

From 1990 until 2003, under Bush (I), Bill Clinton, and Bush (II), the U.S. and, at its behest the United Nations, imposed crippling economic sanctions on Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein. The sanctions made it impossible for Iraq to maintain a basic health infrastructure and led to an explosion of water-borne diseases—typhoid, cholera, and especially diarrhea which hit children the hardest. A United Nations agency estimated the staggering death toll at 500,000 or more Iraqi children under five who died due to the sanctions.

In 1996, while serving as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright was asked by 60 Minutes interviewer Leslie Stahl: “We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright did not contest the number of deaths or that they were due to the sanctions. She replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from August 1997 until September 1998, called sanctions “a deliberate, active program—it’s not just negligence, it’s active—it’s a deliberate decision to sustain a program that they know is killing and targeting children and people. Then it’s a program of some sort, and I think it’s a program of genocide. I just don’t have a better word.”

Genocidal Criminals Have No Right to Speak on Genocide

With the invasion of Ukraine by Russian capitalism-imperialism, and with compelling evidence that Russia is committing war crimes against civilians, the rulers of the U.S. have branded themselves as upholders of international law, protectors against war crimes, and the enforcers of prohibitions against genocide. And, as they pump billions of dollars of increasingly powerful weapons into Ukraine, they invoke these claims to enlist people in this country behind their objectives in Ukraine.

If you sign up for that, knowing even what is outlined in this one article, you are taking sides with the greatest perpetrator of war crimes and genocide in history.

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) identifies in A BASIC PRINCIPLE ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE:

Certainly, the big power bullying and aggression by Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine a clear example, is something that all decent people should oppose. But no decent person should be joining in with the U.S. imperialists in their rivalry with Russian imperialism. For reasons I will get into here, it is utter, disgusting hypocrisy for the U.S. imperialists, and their media mouthpieces and other representatives, to be self-righteously condemning this Russian invasion, when the U.S. is the country which has, by far, carried out the most invasions and other acts of violent interference in other countries....

And, as BA is quoted in that same article:

What is called for, and urgently now, is to oppose all imperialist marauders and mass murderers, and all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation, while giving particular emphasis to opposing “our own” imperialist oppressors who commit their monstrous crimes “in our name” and seek to rally us to support them on the basis of a grotesque American chauvinism, which we must firmly reject and fiercely struggle against.