Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 31 September 16-22, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
Inevitable
Ring to the Unimaginable BY
JOHN PILGER Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index If
the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can really be
surprised? Two
days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and
American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared in
the mainstream media in Britain. An
estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in London,
died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf
War. This
was never news that touched public consciousness in the west. At
least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a
result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain. In
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical
Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA. The
terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most wanted
man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money and
backing. In
Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long
ago were it not for US backing. Far
from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its
victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its
forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on
earth. This
fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best
minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of
international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign
policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way
legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence
portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence." That
Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq
and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms
supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now
speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism"
says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is
managed. One
of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no
comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so
terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of Western
policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could bankroll and
manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or rather its own
innocent people? The
attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic
and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the
state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal
occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours by
Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the victims of
the West's intervention in their homelands. "America,
which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league table: perhaps
as many as 20,000 victims." As
Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss of
innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television networks of
the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million
dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion
of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the
US, which made them almost inevitable. It
is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia. Since the
end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally Britain, have
exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while the divisions
imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before. An
elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the
world's wealth. In
defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free
market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the
illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to
its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile
economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little
more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the
demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the
poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in
Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and South Korea (in order
to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status). Western
terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists
dare not speak or write. The
expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson
government received almost no press coverage. Their
homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers
patrol the Middle East. In
Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity of the US
and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto with
assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed. "Getting
British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal",
says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent. British
behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in Vietnam, for
which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food, villages turned into
concentration camps and more than half a million people forcibly dispossessed. In
Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation was
apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what Edward
Said rightly calls cultural imperialism. In
Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000
people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in
Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader
Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua. All
of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece. Now
imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with
impunity from bases in 50 countries. "Full
spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim. Read
the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt. In
this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent
adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as
"peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international
law: a record matched by no other British government for half a century. What
has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you travel among the
impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do
with it. People
are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their
resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their
accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and
privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism. But
how patient the oppressed have been. It
is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow
themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the
US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a
people scarred by imperialism. Their
distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised
places have at last come home. John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning journalist. Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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