Donald Trump’s Genocidal Acts Against Humanity

In 1979, United Nations Committee on Human Rights rapporteur Abdelwahab Bouhdiba cited the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia as an example of “autogenocide,” the carrying out or enabling of mass deaths among one’s own nation. Previously cited examples of genocide at the time Bouhdiba’s coined the word autogenocide, were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The former’s genocide of Eastern European Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other non-Germans also included German Jewish and other citizens, making it a practitioner of both genocide and autogenocide. The genocide of Chinese by Japanese military occupiers fit the broader definition of genocide.

In addition of mass executions, Bouhdiba found that the Khmer Rouge also committed genocide through famine and disease. The latter included dysentery, cholera, and typhus. That conclusion in light of Donald Trump’s criminal negligence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, which has witnessed the United States topping the world’s charts in infections and deaths, evokes the Khmer Rouge precedent in suggesting that Trump and his administration have been practicing autogenocide against the American people.

Over the last century-and-a-half years, autogenocide from governments permitting the spread of deadly infectious diseases has been alleged by various human rights lawyers and historians. These include the actions of the Ottoman Turks against Armenian nationals of the empire from 1915 to 1916, of various Congolese armed factions against the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 1990s to the present, and by the Saudi-backed Yemeni puppet government against the people of Yemen.

But what of the 135,000 (and counting) deaths of Americans from Covid-19 caused principally by the criminal negligence of the Trump regime? When the statistics are perused, the victims of Trump’s genocide-by-inaction are principally ethnic minorities, an alarm bell that should be sounding in every international human rights office around the world.

The following is what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reported about the deaths from Covid-19 of non-white ethnic groups in the United States: “Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put some members of racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting COVID-19 or experiencing severe illness, regardless of age. Among some racial and ethnic minority groups, including Non-Hispanic black persons, Hispanics and Latinos, and American Indians/Alaska Natives, evidence points to higher rates of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 than among Non-Hispanic white persons. As of June 12, 2020, age-adjusted hospitalization rates are highest among Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native and Non-Hispanic black persons, followed by Hispanic or Latino persons.” This disparity can be traced to the Trump administration’s disregard for testing and tracing among ethnic minorities and failure to provide adequate medical assistance to hard-hit regions where non-white ethnic minorities are predominant, including inner cities, rural areas of the Deep South and Southwest, and Native American reservations. When Trump told a crowd of his racist supporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma that he ordered his administration “to slow the testing down,” it was the closest thing to an admission by Trump that he is only interested a causing mass deaths from Covid-19. Such previous acts by ruthless leaders and warlords have resulted in charges of autogenocide in Ottoman Turkey, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Yemen. Trump gave his autogenocide policies a dry run in 2017 when he withheld needed relief aid to Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth territory, in the wake of the disastrous Hurricane Maria.

The CDC’s analysis shows that Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native persons have a rate approximately 5 times that of non-Hispanic white persons, and Hispanic or Latino persons have a rate approximately 4 times that of non-Hispanic white persons. That is a documented set of statistics that open the door for an investigation by U.S. and international human rights teams of a possible concerted effort by key individuals in the Trump administration, including Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, presidential senior advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar of adopting policies to bring about the highest number of deaths among non-white Americans by limiting, embargoing, restricting, or otherwise interfering with the delivery of medical assistance to regions of the United States where non-white Americans are concentrated.

A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that non-white Covid-19 deaths far exceed the averages in total death counts. In Alabama, African-Americans make up 27 percent of the population but account for 45 percent of all Covid deaths. In Mississippi, where African-Americans account for 38 percent of the overall population, they also account for an alarming 50 percent of all Covid deaths. In Georgia, blacks are 31 percent of the population and have suffered 47 percent of overall deaths. In Louisiana, the ratio is 32 percent to 53 percent of overall deaths. In South Carolina, it is 26 percent to 45 percent. In the District of Columbia, the capital city of the United States, where blacks comprise 45 percent of the population, they account for a staggering 74 percent of overall deaths. In Nebraska, Hispanics are 11 percent of the total population and account for 24 percent of overall deaths. In Arizona, where Native Americans account for 4 percent of the population, their overall death count is 16 percent.

Embargoing, restricting, or otherwise withholding virus testing kits, ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other medical materiel from African-American neighborhoods, Hispanic barrios, Native American reservations, and other regions based on ethnicity, the preponderance of co-morbidities among the targeted population, and other discriminating factors could constitute the conducting of biological warfare by permitting Covid to rampantly spread to vulnerable groups. Trump also restricted the dissemination of important Covid data from federal agencies to state and local government public health departments. This policy was readopted by states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, which refused to share Covid data with county and municipal health authorities.

The involvement of Trump son-in-law Kushner in commandeering supplies of ventilators, PPE, and other supplies to individual states makes him a potential criminal co-conspirator, along with Trump, Pence, Miller, Azar, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and others, in conducting passive biological warfare. Targets of this passive warfare included African-Americans; Hispanic-Americans; Native Americans; elderly military veterans who were administered lethal and untested hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug; and nursing home residents of all ethnicities. In some cases, the White House targets were not ethnic, but political. Democratic Party states were victimized by medical supply embargoes with Republican states receiving more favorable treatment.

“New York” magazine charged the White House with carrying out a wartime operation against state governments. The magazine’s “Intelligencer” column on April 19 of this year wrote, “in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War — to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need.” Kushner announced at a White House press conference that the federal medical stockpile was not meant for use by the states, as if the states were not included in the “United States of America.”

In addition to embargoing the federal stockpile of medical supplies to the states, the Trump White House began ordering federal agents to begin confiscating ventilators, respirator masks, and other supplied from states, local governments, and private medical firms. This biological warfare-by-proxy targeted the States of Colorado and Michigan, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Los Angeles, Somerset County in New Jersey, and Kaiser Permanente.

The domestic embargoing of health care supplies, along with the hobbling of federal health agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization, all represent individual criminal charges in an indictment of the Trump administration for carrying out “autogenocide” against the American people. Trump is not the only leader carrying out Covid-related autogenocide against his own people. Ideally, Trump, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, members of their regimes, and a few other worthies should all be paraded before the International Criminal Court in The Hague to answer to criminal charges of autogenocide.

Donald Trump’s Genocidal Acts Against Humanity