>Date: 15 Sep 2001 00:24:01 -0000
> "Chris Boyce" <[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] Fwd:ZNet Commentary / Pilger and Herman / Context / Sept 14
>On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 21:36:07 -0400 Michael Albert <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>Hello,
>>
>>During September we are mailing to ZNet's 50,000 Free Update Recipients
>>our Daily Sustainer Commentary which usually goes only to our Sustainer
>>Program members.
>>
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>>
>>Today's commentaries, responding again to the recent terror in the U.S.,
>>are by John Pilger from England, and Edward Herman from the U.S.
>>
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>>
>>======
>>
>>
>>Brief Preparatory Note:
>>
>>A number of folks receiving ZNet Commentaries say they want help dealing
>>with their neighbors', school mates', friends', and family's
>>militaristic feelings and even with their own emotions. They wonder how
>>our recent essays, full of context and history, bear on all that.
>>
>>There could be about 5,000 deaths from the horrific events in NYC. If
>>so, some relevant context is that the same level of human loss would
>>have to happen in the U.S. once every month, all year long, for over
>>fifteen years, for the death toll to match what U.S. policies have
>>imposed on Iraq. This grisly accounting doesn't make the pain here any
>>less, but it may help reveal that the pain elsewhere, induced by U.S
>>policies, is even greater, perhaps opening the way to compassion and
>>solidarity.
>>
>>If there is a moral principle that ought to apply to bin Laden or the
>>Taliban or to anyone who may commit or abet acts of terror, shouldn't
>>that principle also apply to us? If so, a relevant bit of context is
>>that to employ terror was our stated policy in Iraq and Yugoslavia,
>>where in both cases we admitted and even bragged that we were attacking
>>the population to collapse the governments. So who brings us to justice?
>>And do we really think being brought to justice ought to mean suffering
>>terror, in turn?
>>
>>In my experience, sometimes using the kinds of information in ZNet's
>>essays to make such connections opens avenues of understanding. On the
>>other hand, I have to admit, sometimes it doesn't. Maybe others have
>>better ideas about how to connect with people and if so, sharing those
>>ideas and experiences in coming days may help. Changing minds is not
>>easy or fast, but it is certainly necessary, and contrary to what many
>>pundits are saying, I think the public is mostly confused, and not
>>mostly lusting for blood.
>>
>>-----------------
>>
>>Inevitable ring to the unimaginable
>>By John Pilger
>>
>>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 south east 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.
>>
>>September 13, 2001
>>
>>------
>>
>>FOLKS OUT THERE HAVE A "DISTASTE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL
>>VALUES"
>>
>>Edward S. Herman
>>
>>One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or
>>refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for
>>the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations.
>>But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that
>>current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may
>>be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible.
>>Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12),
>>the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War
>>and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States
>>and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own
>>actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian
>>"reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from
>>Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the
>>problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.
>>
>>The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the
>>anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of
>>Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed.
>>The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly
>>mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S.
>>government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade
>>Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous
>>immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import
>>devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of
>>millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in
>>this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in
>>the dark.
>>
>>Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting
>>rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating
>>"nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the
>>masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for
>>immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as
>>fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose
>>contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with
>>such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security
>>States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky
>>and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an
>>administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United
>>States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families,
>>and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in
>>the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward
>>the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
>>
>>During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military
>>power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S.
>>choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the
>>people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left
>>Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal
>>report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer
>>from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical
>>weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with
>>well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.
>>
>>The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States
>>supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive
>>engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge
>>cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the
>>1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of
>>guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its
>>long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may
>>have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the
>>numerous victims.
>>
>>Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an
>>amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of
>>interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they
>>surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all
>>through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a
>>blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their
>>civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people,
>>was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his
>>war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship
>>was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service"
>>(but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has
>>never mentioned this high level commendation).
>>
>>The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a
>>long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic
>>cleansing process, has produced two intifadas-- uprisings reflecting the
>>desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight
>>for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the
>>United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and
>>carte blanche as regards policy.
>>
>>All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization
>>and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these
>>include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves
>>Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to
>>use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine
>>imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes
>>supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even
>>billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not
>>recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are
>>spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose
>>principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the
>>future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that
>>imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that
>>the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the
>>rampaging empire._
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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