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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Jan 13

Liberals like to complain that journalists and others have normalized Trump and his racism, authoritarianism, etc.,but this is precisely what 75 years of US hegemony have done - completely normalized the US allying with repressive regimes, regularly bombing other countries, etc.

Much of the rest of the world views US support for Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and bombing of Yemen as the act of an unaccountable empire. Most Americans just assume we will bomb several countries a year and conduct military ops in many more, because its always been this way.

What seems to much of the rest of the world as pathological militarism and contempt for international law feels so natural to most Americans that they barely notice. Most Americans simply cannot imagine a US that doesn’t regularly bomb and intervene in other countries.

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Dec 31, 2023

As a historian who has researched and studied genocide in places like Indonesia and Timor Leste, I am deeply aware of the difficulties of determining when it seems clear that genocidal violence is unfolding. The Israeli annihilation of Gaza clearly meets that threshold.

In most genocides there is an information vacuum, and details trickle out because of the difficulties of reporting in real time and placing events in context. Even in well publicized genocides - Rwanda, Bosnia - reporters and diplomats were behind the curve in grasping events.

In East Timor and Indonesia, which I have studied well, a handful of voices characterized what was happening at the time as genocide (or politicide), but it took months or years before the international or scholarly community would generally acknowledge this.

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Dec 10, 2023

The first Palestinian person I ever met was my junior year in Germany. He was a medical student named Nimr living on the floor of my apartment building, and for weeks, he wouldn’t talk to me. At one point I asked him why he wouldn’t talk to me, and he said because I was American.

This struck me, and so I asked him to explain. He told me that he lived in the West Bank and he and his sister would cross through checkpoints every day to go to work in Israel. And every day he had to watch his sister be groped and sexually humiliated by checkpoint soldiers.

He said one of the things he remembered was that the soldiers carried American M-16s and he understood that the United States was on the side of the people who daily sexually assaulted his sibling. This lasted for several years, he told me.

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Nov 11, 2023

Israel is doing to Gaza what every historian of colonialism and counterinsurgency can tell stories of - responding to an atrocity against metropolitan civilians or attack on colonial soldiers with a punitive counter massacre of civilians on a far larger scale.

Indonesia did this in East Timor many times. It was the logic of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981, and many French massacres in Algeria. One goal of such counter-terror massacres is to demonstrate the vulnerability and helplessness of those being massacred.

Usually the main “audience” of such terror massacres is the colonial subjects. In this case, however, Israel is also deliberately demonstrating the helplessness of the entire world - and especially the UN - to stop it from destroying Gaza and killing tens of thousands.

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Oct 25, 2023

Historian of US foreign policy here. One of the core functions of US diplomacy towards client states engaging in mass murder is denial of death tolls. I cannot think of a single example of simple acknowledgment of client state atrocities since 1945. A few examples:

When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, with US military and diplomatic backing, its armed forces killed 50-100k civilians in the first 12 months (roughly 15% of the population). US officials flatly denied the scope and scale of killing:() jstor.org/stable/40647042

In Dec. 1981 a US backed El Salvadoran special forces unit massacred more than 800 civilians amidst the Salvadoran civil war. The Reagan Administration, led by Elliot Abrams, initially just denied the massacre or blamed FMLN guerrillas. thenation.com/article/archiv…

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

@bradleyrsimpson

Mar 24, 2022

In early 1999 or so, while I was in grad school I was arrested for disrupting a speech Madeline Albright gave before the Chicago World Council. I had been in Iraq for the second time just a few weeks before, Delivering medicine to Iraqi hospitals in defiance of US /UN sanctions.

I was sitting next to an old Jewish couple from Ukraine who had escaped separately from a German concentration camp at the end of the war and made their way all the way across Russia, and eventually to Hawaii where they reconnected before moving to Chicago.

I told them of my travels and that I was part of a group called voices in the wilderness that believed in the need to witness against the devastating impact of the sanctions. Then I got up, unfurled a sign and started shouting questions at Albright as she spoke.

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

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Brad Simpson (bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social)

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