By Jack D. Forbes

I grew up during World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the hope that the days of nationalistic wars had come to an end. The Allies had put together a powerful coalition of countries willing to pool their resources in order to defeat the nationalisms of Germany, Italy, and Japan. We were all aware of how the Germans, Italians, and Japanese were indoctrinated by biased school curricula, government propaganda, "patriotic" religious leaders, nationalistic youth organizations, et cetera, to believe that their initial invasions of Manchuria, Poland, and Ethiopia were justified.

I long believed that at least a strong majority of our people had learned enough from the Second World War to believe in internationalism and human-wide solidarity. After all, most of the US population belong to religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, et cetera, which have followers all around the globe and surely we feel solidarity with our own co-religionists, or do we? Moreover, many of us espouse varieties of humanism which hark to a global human family, or we pray to the Great Creator Power for "all our relations."

Of course, the manner in which Native Americans, African-Americans, and other non-whites have been, and still are, treated suggests that many Yanks do not have very strong feelings of inter-ethnic familyhood. But what really has caused me to question just how "advanced" we are as a country has been the media reaction to the killing of 300,000 or more Native Americans in Central America by terrorists and government troops supported by the United States ( the Reagan and Bush I administrations), coupled with the support of murderous rebel groups in Angola and Mozambique during the same period, resulting in the rape, murder, and maiming (often by land mines) of millions of Africans. Add to this our public indifference to the continued expansion of Israel against the Palestinians (Christians, please note, as well as Muslims), our indifference to the genocide in Rwanda, our tacit support of the formerly brutal Maoist regime in Cambodia, and our indifference to the Indonesian oppression of western New Guineans and Portuguese-speaking Timorese (which we seem to have given approval to); and I could go on and on.

I was as shocked as anyone at the massacre of persons on 9-11 by terrorists, but I became convinced that it was very revealing as to how the 3,000 or so deaths were treated in relation to the hundreds of thousands of Africans, Native Americans, and others dying under equally horrible conditions in recent years.

It became apparent that our media, and perhaps their listeners and readers, do not feel any genuine sense of kinship with the Mayas of Guatemala, the Nicaraguans, the Palestinians, or Black Africans of numerous nationalities. This feeling has been confirmed by the manner in which our newspapers report deaths in Iraq. Usually only US service men and women are included in death totals, now up to over 900 as I write. What about the British, Polish, and other forces, and what about the Iraqis? Do not the latter deserve death totals, for both civilians and fighters?

Are the Iraqis not human beings? Were they not made by the same Creator, or am I mistaken in that? Have we fallen to the level of our most virulent enemies, who often are quoted as only wanting to kill infidels or crusaders? Perhaps, those outside of the circle of US citizenship or military service are utterly unimportant to us. If so, then we are suffering from the same disease as our enemies.

I was appalled at the length of time it took for us to become engaged in an effort to halt the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia a few years back. The victims were European Muslims, Jews, and secularists. Women were systematically raped, death camps were established by the Christian Serbs, and wholesale massacres took place, as at Srebrenica. Ancient mosques were destroyed, farms were seized, and we did nothing worth noting.

Why? The Bosnian victims were white people, but since most of them were Muslims (although not very devout it seems) the Christian world seemed frozen in lethargy. Interestingly, some of the Muslims from the Arab world poured funds into Bosnia to help the victims and even sent some fighters there to help defend them.

We also seem to have been very slow to concern ourselves with the oppression directed by Milosevic towards the Albanians of Kosovo for many years. Again, the Albanians were largely Muslim Europeans. Like the Palestinians they seem to have aroused few examples of sympathy from US people or from our government until the wholesale expulsions by Serbian troops, much like what has recently been going on in Darfur. In the latter connection, it is interesting how slow our government was to get involved in the decades of persecution of southern Sudanese by the Khartoum government of Sudan.

Of course, it is true that the USA cannot deal with every issue of oppression and ethnic cleansing in the world. But that is precisely what the United Nations was created for, along with numerous international treaties . I have always been impressed by the generally favorable attitude of Europeans towards the UN, but equally depressed by the indifference and even hostility of many Yanks to the international body. Not only do we have right-wing "militia" and racist groups spreading all kinds of outrageous rumors about the UN, but we have presidential administrations flouting international law and weakening the UN, as in the recent ill-advised invasion of "sovereign" Iraq.

Are we not one of the super-nationalist countries of the globe? Perhaps we see ourselves as so strong and "right" that we think we do not need a world community.

Jack Forbes is professor emeritus of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. He has many published works, including RED BLOOD, NATIVE AMERICANS OF CALIFORNIA AND NEVADA and ONLY APPROVED INDIANS.