John Pilger essay with a brief note from
Michael Albert.
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
http://www.plugincinema.com
*******************************************
"The classical hollywood mode is, however, one
system among many that have been and could be used
for constructing films."
Bordwell & Thompson
|
