The American's Untermenschen- Iraqi-Afghani deaths don't count- Combat Exemptions

800 Cases Filed on Civilians Killed in US Wars: ACLU

WASHINGTON — More than 800 complaints have been filed by families of civilians killed in US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil rights watchdog said citing documents made public Thursday.

Iraqi men carry the coffin of a killed relative during a funeral. (AFP image)The 13,000 pages of documents made public by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) include "more than 800 claims for damages by the family members of those killed, including many that were denied," the group said in a statement.

The group obtained the documents following a September 2007 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

It said many of the claims were denied under the "combat exemption" clause to the Foreign Claims Act (FCA), "which provides that harm inflicted on residents of foreign countries by US soldiers during combat cannot be compensated under the FCA, even if the victims had no involvement whatsoever in the combat."

Due to the claim denials, "many innocent civilians were not compensated for their harm or were referred to the Commander's Emergency Response Program for a discretionary condolence payment that is subject to an automatic 2,500-dollar limit per death," the ACLU said.

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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gy72VWjSvExJ4HaiRGuhgDaR20Wg

Untermensch

Eytomology

Although usually considered to have been coined by the Nazis themselves, the term "under man" in the above mentioned sense was actually first used by American author Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).<1> The German word "Untermensch" itself had been used earlier (not in a racial sense), e.g. in a 1899 novel by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employ the term do not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language (and therefore do not seem to be aware of Stoddard's original term "under man"), "Untermensch" is usually back-translated into English as "sub-human." A leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that "this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the 'under man.'" <"...den Lothrop Stoddard als 'Untermenschen' bezeichnete."><2> Quoting Stoddard: "The Under-Man -- the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.

However, it is possible that Stoddard constructed his "under man" as an antipode to Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch (or superman) concept. Stoddard doesn't say so explicitly, but he refers critically to the "superman" idea at the end of his book (p. 262). Wordplays with Nietzsche's term seem to have been used repeatedly as early as the 19th century and, due to the German linguistic trait of being able to combine prefixes and roots almost at will in order to create new words, this development was even somewhat logical. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in his novel Der Pharrt (1898, see Chapter 33). As a matter of fact, even Nietzsche himself used "Untermensch" at least once in contrast to "Übermensch" (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft <1882>, 3rd book, Chapter 143) but this bears no resemblance to the Untermensch in later thought. Earlier examples of "Untermensch" include Romanticist Jean Paul using the term in his novel Hesperus (1795) in reference to an Orangutan (Chapter "8. Hundposttag").

Stoddard's book-long diatribe dealt with the recent takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia, arguing that that country was now ruled by the most degenerate people on the Earth. He thought that the combination of the alleged inherent racial inferiority of Russian Slavs, the idiocy of a political creed that appealed to the vilest human instincts (e.g. jealousy towards the more gifted and the more affluent) and the supposed fact that the Communist Party's rank and file consisted of "born criminals" in the most conventional sense of the word necessitated a completely new term to describe this phenomenon: "the under man." In this sense, for Stoddard, the October Revolution was the battle cry for an upcoming, unavoidable clash of the civilized nations with the "masses of the east." If the white race was intent upon winning that confrontation with the "under man," so the message went, it had to turn away from ill-conceived liberal ideas and adopt drastic changes of policy instead, e.g. by introducing far-ranging eugenics programmes.<3>

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch