Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 36 October 21 - 27, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
A War in the American Tradition BY
JOHN PILGER
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Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan crosses new boundaries. It means that
America's economic wars are now backed by the perpetual threat of military
attack on any country, without legal pretence. It is also the first to endanger
populations at home. The ultimate goal is not the capture of a fanatic, which
would be no more than a media circus, but the acceleration of western imperial
power. That is a truth the modern imperialists and their fellow travellers will
not spell out, and which the public in the west, now exposed to a full-scale
jihad, has the right to know. In
his zeal, Tony Blair has come closer to an announcement of real intentions than
any British leader since Anthony Eden. Not simply the handmaiden of Washington,
Blair, in the Victorian verbosity of his extraordinary speech to the Labour
Party conference, puts us on notice that imperialism's return journey to
respectability is well under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision
of a better world for "the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the
ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa
to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan". Hark, his
unctuous concern for the "human rights of the suffering women of
Afghanistan" as he colludes in bombing them and preventing food reaching
their starving children. Is
all this a dark joke? Far from it; as Frank Furedi reminds us in the New
Ideology of Imperialism , it is not long ago "that the moral claims of
imperialism were seldom questioned in the west. Imperialism and the global
expansion of the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms
as a major contributor to human civilisation". The quest went wrong when it
was clear that fascism, with all its ideas of racial and cultural superiority,
was imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best
Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Since
the end of the cold war, a new opportunity has arisen. The economic and
political crises in the developing world, largely the result of imperialism,
such as the blood-letting in the Middle East and the destruction of commodity
markets in Africa, now serve as retrospective justification for imperialism.
Although the word remains unspeakable, the western intelligentsia, conservatives
and liberals alike, today boldly echo Bush and Blair's preferred euphemism,
"civilisation". Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and the
former liberal editor Harold Evans share a word whose true meaning relies on a
comparison with those who are uncivilised, inferior and might challenge the
"values"of the west, specifically its God-given right to control and
plunder the uncivilised. If
there was any doubt that the World Trade Center attacks were the direct result
of the ravages of imperialism, Osama Bin Laden, a mutant of imperialism,
dispelled it in his videotaped diatribe about Palestine, Iraq and the end of
America's inviolacy. Alas, he said nothing about hating modernity and
miniskirts, the explanation of those intoxicated and neutered by the supercult
of Americanism. An accounting of the sheer scale and continuity and consequences
of American imperial violence is our elite's most enduring taboo. Contrary
to myth, even the homicidal invasion of Vietnam was regarded by its tactical
critics as a "noble cause" into which the United States
"stumbled" and became "bogged down". Hollywood has long
purged the truth of that atrocity, just as it has shaped, for many of us, the
way we perceive contemporary history and the rest of humanity. And now that much
of the news itself is Hollywood-inspired, amplified by amazing technology and
with its internalised mission to minimise western culpability, it is hardly
surprising that many today do not see the trail of blood. How
very appropriate that the bombing of Afghanistan is being conducted, in part, by
the same B52 bombers that destroyed much of Indochina 30 years ago. In Cambodia
alone, 600,000 people died beneath American bombs, providing the catalyst for
the rise of Pol Pot, as CIA files make clear. Once again, newsreaders refer to
Diego Garcia without explanation. It is where the B52s refuel. Thirty-five years
ago, in high secrecy and in defiance of the United Nations, the British
government of Harold Wilson expelled the entire population of the island of
Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in order to hand it to the Americans in
perpetuity as a nuclear arms dump and a base from which its long-range bombers
could police the Middle East. Until the islanders finally won a high court
action last year, almost nothing about their imperial dispossession appeared in
the British media. How
appropriate that John Negroponte is Bush's ambassador at the United Nations.
This week, he delivered America's threat to the world that it may
"require" to attack more and more countries. As US ambassador to
Honduras in the early 1980s, Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regime's
death squads, known as Battalion 316, that wiped out the democratic opposition,
while the CIA ran its "contra" war of terror against neighbouring
Nicaragua. Murdering teachers and slitting the throats of midwives were a
speciality. This was typical of the terrorism that Latin America has long
suffered, with its principal torturers and tyrants trained and financed by the
great warrior against "global terrorism", which probably harbours more
terrorists and assassins in Florida than any country on earth. The
unread news today is that the "war against terrorism" is being
exploited in order to achieve objectives that consolidate American power. These
include: the bribing and subjugation of corrupt and vulnerable governments in
former Soviet central Asia, crucial for American expansion in the region and
exploitation of the last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world; Nato's
occupation of Macedonia, marking a final stage in its colonial odyssey in the
Balkans; the expansion of the American arms industry; and the speeding up of
trade liberalisation. What
did Blair mean when, in Brighton, he offered the poor "access to our
markets so that we practise the free trade that we are so fond of
preaching"? He was feigning empathy for most of humanity's sense of
grievance and anger: of "feeling left out". So, as the bombs fall,
"more inclusion", as the World Trade Organisation puts it, is being
offered the poor - that is, more privatisation, more structural adjustment, more
theft of resources and markets, more destruction of tariffs. On Monday, the
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Patricia Hewitt, called a meeting of
the voluntary aid agencies to tell them that, "since 11 September, the case
is now overwhelming" for the poor to be given "more trade
liberation". She might have used the example of those impoverished
countries where her cabinet colleague Clare Short's ironically named Department
for International Development backs rapacious privatisation campaigns on behalf
of British multinational companies, such as those vying to make a killing in a
resource as precious as water. Bush
and Blair claim to have "world opinion with us". No, they have elites
with them, each with their own agenda: such as Vladimir Putin's crushing of
Chechnya, now permissible, and China's rounding up of its dissidents, now
permissible. Moreover, with every bomb that falls on Afghanistan and perhaps
Iraq to come, Islamic and Arab militancy will grow and draw the battle lines of
"a clash of civilisations" that fanatics on both sides have long
wanted. In societies represented to us only in caricature, the west's double
standards are now understood so clearly that they overwhelm, tragically, the
solidarity that ordinary people everywhere felt with the victims of 11
September. That,
and his contribution to the re-emergence of xeno-racism in Britain, is the
messianic Blair's singular achievement. His effete, bellicose certainties
represent a political and media elite that has never known war. The public, in
contrast, has given him no mandate to kill innocent people, such as those
Afghans who risked their lives to clear landmines, killed in their beds by
American bombs. These acts of murder place Bush and Blair on the same level as
those who arranged and incited the twin towers murders. Perhaps never has a
prime minister been so out of step with the public mood, which is uneasy,
worried and measured about what should be done. Gallup finds that 82 per cent
say "military action should only be taken after the identity of the
perpetrators was clearly established, even if this process took several months
to accomplish". Among those elite members paid and trusted to speak out, there is a lot of silence. Where are those in parliament who once made their names speaking out, and now shame themselves by saying nothing? Where are the voices of protest from "civil society", especially those who run the increasingly corporatised aid agencies and take the government's handouts and often its line, then declare their "non-political" status when their outspokenness on behalf of the impoverished and bombed might save lives? The tireless Chris Buckley of Christian Aid, and a few others, are honourably excepted. Where are those proponents of academic freedom and political independence, surely one of the jewels of western "civilisation"? Years of promoting the jargon of "liberal realism" and misrepresenting imperialism as crisis management, rather than the cause of the crisis, have taken their toll. Speaking up for international law and the proper pursuit of justice, even diplomacy, and against our terrorism might not be good for one's career. Or as Voltaire put it: "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." That does not change the fact that it is right. Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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