November 14, 2005
Why
is it that the
US military's use of napalm in Fallujah is a surprise? It does
symbolize whopping moral hypocrisy in that the US government insisted the
casus belli for invading Iraq was that country's asserted
possession of weapons of mass destruction; so what does the US military
do? They use the self-same weapons on Iraqi civilians: napalm is a banned
chemical weapon.
But hypocrisy drenched in
evil is not new to US politicos, nor was it new to history's miscreants.
Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf wrote: "...the world will be governed
by the law of natural distribution of power, and then those nations will
be victorious who are of more brutal will and are not the nations who have
practiced self-denial." The US embodies this pre-Straussian philosophy
close to its breast. It is for the world to see, as the US regime
continues to pressure Iran and northern Korea over their alleged nuclear
intentions while defying nuclear treaties, upgrading their own nuclear
arsenal, and ignoring the possession of nuclear weapons by US client
states such as Israel.
Why should the use of napalm
surprise anyone when the US authorities approve the use of indiscriminate
weapons such as cluster bombs? Why should the use of napalm surprise when
it uses depleted uranium-laced weapons that are strongly linked to the ill
health of US troops (rendering them to the status of cannon fodder)? Heavy
bombing and a wholesale disregard for Iraqi civilians (over 100,000 of
which have been slaughtered), undeniably adduces a callous insouciance for
human life.
Cynicism aside, the great
surprise is that an aggression which represents what the Nuremberg
Tribunal deemed "the supreme international crime differing only from other
war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole," affirmed as illegal by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, can
continue unhindered. The party guilty of the "supreme international crime"
carries on its occupations and egregiously manipulates and imposes its
will on the international body politic to further its econo-imperialist aims:
absolving Israel of condemnation for its ethnic cleansing and genocide,
and targeting the victims of US-Israeli imperialism -- Iran, Syria, and
the colonialistically labeled "insurgents" [1] of Iraq.
The whole illegal enterprise
of the aggression of Iraq has been arrantly exposed. The Downing Street
memos indicate prima facie: "the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy" prior to the invasion of Iraq. [2]
But as the mathematician Bertrand Russell once lamented, "There is no
nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority
by adequate governmental action."
Meanwhile, the US runs its
own gulag archipelago around the world, where individuals deemed by the US
state to be its enemies are deprived of human rights, detained
indefinitely, and subject to torture. The horrors of torture cannot
adequately conveyed by the word itself. How can a word capture the
emotionally charged imagery and excruciating pain of electrical shocks
delivered to one's genitals? Of ensanguined brooms shoved deep into one's
rectum. Of being forced to stand upright, naked, and shivering for hours
on end while deprived of sleep?
The administration of
President George Bush is reeling from a few pitfalls that it has
encountered but its agenda to entrench a Pax Americana proceeds
apace. [3] That the Bush regime lies to attain its
malicious ends is unsurprising. As authentic journalist I.F. Stone stated,
"Among all the things I'm going to tell you today about being a
journalist, all you have to remember is two words: governments lie."
Today, Stone might add: "And the media regurgitates government lies as the
truth."
Since progressives are so
aware of the importance of language (as George Orwell and others have
elucidated at length) and so aware of the consent manufactured by the
corporate media, one wonders at the willingness of progressives to label
the corporate media as the mainstream media and to relegate themselves to
a mere alternative media. [4] The corporate media has
thoroughly prostituted itself to profit. It has no rightful place in
either the alternative or mainstream. In fact, some would argue that the
corporate media through its dissemination of disinformation and propaganda
is guilty of crimes against humanity. [5]
The war criminals continue to
set their sights on self-designated enemies. The increasingly irrelevant
UN abets the empire in spreading the "scourge of war" to small countries.
The Ethic Cleansing Machine known as Israel continues to destroy
Palestinians. Syria and Iran find themselves in the crosshairs of
imperialists -- inundated by the aggressive propaganda of the US state
that has long ago forfeited claim to any pretense of credibility.
Progressive movements in South America are demonized.
Toward a Wider Middle East
War
Whether or not Syria is
assisting or lax toward the resistance in Iraq provides no justification
for a US attack against Syria. Since the US invasion of Iraq was illegal,
therefore, by any semblance of morality and logic, the US has no
legitimate right to occupy that country. It is the Zionist entity and the
US that stand to gain from manufacturing a world consensus against Syria
and Iran. It is they who stood to gain from the 10 November Amman
bombings.
Ha'aretz reported, "Israelis ... at the
Radisson SAS were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security
forces, apparently due to a specific security alert." [6]
The LA Times
interviewed Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counter-terrorism
official who boasted, either oblivious to the implication of his words or
so thoroughly fascist as to no longer care:
It
means there was excellent intelligence that this thing was going to
happen.
The Times writers were adroit enough to ask why the Jordanians
working at the hotel were not evacuated. [7] It was,
after all, supposedly Jordanian security that informed the Israelis but
apparently not their own citizens nor the head of Palestinian military
intelligence Maj. Gen. Bashir Nafeh and officials of a Chinese Defense
delegation who were killed. [8]
Who was to blame? Ha'aretz
quoted an anonymous police official: "The attacks carry the
trademark of Al-Qaida."
It was no wonder then that the phantom bane of the US occupation forces in
Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, would be blamed; later, a woman identified as
al-Zarqawi's sister Sajida al-Rishawi would be captured and confess.
The Amman bombings have
prodded the dictator king Abdullah to mobilize Jordan, "a key ally of both
the United States and Israel [as noted by Ha'aretz]" to more openly
back the US War on Terrorism.
Faced with a relentless Iraqi
resistance, neighboring Jordan seems to provide US occupation forces in
Iraq a politically dependable withdrawal option as their control outside
Baghdad's Green Zone evanesces.
A covetous, overextended
empire begins to unravel. Despite the occupier's stated good intentions,
Iraqis are not interested in having US-style democracy and freedom
lethally imposed on them.
Preserving the Monroe
Doctrine
But it is palpably obvious
that the US regime is not about spreading freedom (except the freedom to
be killed, impoverished, and be ruled by a US-appointed quisling regime).
Neither is the US regime about spreading democracy. It supports various
dictatorial regimes in the world and overthrows democracies that do not
conform to US dictates. Haiti is a most recent example, where the popular
President Jean Bertrand Aristide was deposed by the US and its minions and
forcibly banished to Africa.
The "elite" capitalist ruling
class has decreed that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela must be
overturned. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez spearheads a surging
progressive movement in Latin America. Backed by the people and helped by
rising petroleum profits, Chavez confronts the US state that has backed a
CIA coup plot against him [9] and funded a constitutional
challenge to his rule. Chavez has, until now, withstood the hegemonic
ambitions against Venezuela and its people through their democratic
support.
The progressive agendas of
Aristide and Chavez undermine the profiteering motivation of US
capitalists. In 1971, CIA-backed rightists deposed the Chilean government,
executed the elected president Salvador Allende, and began a reign of
terror. With typical Machiavellianism, Henry Kissinger quipped
disdainfully of Chilean democratic aspirations: "I don't see why we need
to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the
irresponsibility of its own people."
The Bolivarian Revolution led
by Chavez poses the threat of a good example. If the standard-of-living
rises for the populace of Venezuela, it stands as a fillip to the
Bolivarianization of all Latin America. This imperils the Monroe doctrine,
which declares the western hemisphere to be the domain of the United
States.
With this in mind, during the
2002 elections in Bolivia, the US ambassador Manuel Rocha issued a thinly
veiled warning not to elect the socialist candidate Evo Morales: "As a
representative of the United States, I want to remind the Bolivian
electorate that if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major
cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of U.S. assistance
to Bolivia." Morales fell just short of victory in 2002, but after a
ruinous and highly unpopular flirtation with neoliberalism, much to US
government chagrin, Morales is poised to perhaps become the first
indigenous president in Bolivia.
But the neoliberal war is not
only external; it being foisted domestically as well. Thus in the US, the
plutocrats cut taxes for themselves, give crumbs to the proletariat,
mortgage the next generation's future and use their bodies to fight wars
for their further enrichment -- dropkicking the people of the developing
world into deeper immiseration.
This is the outcome of the
corruption and malignancy, the vile and the bile of capitalism and its
outward manifestation of imperialism. It is a system that worships
cupidity and nourishes conceit, racism, and hatred. It militates against
co-operation and pits human against human. People are tainted by its fetid
malfeasance and robbed of their moral core, establishing ego and
selfishness as the hallmarks of capitalism.
But indifference to the
suffering of fellow humans exacts a price from us all. The thirteenth
century Italian philosopher Dante Alighieri reproved bystanders: "The
darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of moral crisis."
It is a darkness that
pervades the nethermost bowels of the human soul -- a darkness that feeds
on indifference.
Kim Petersen,
Co-Editor of Dissident Voice, lives in the traditional Mi'kmaq
homeland colonially designated Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at:
kim@dissidentvoice.org
ENDNOTES
[1] Even the
courageous monitor of power centers Robert Fisk has written in a language
that approximates that of the power centers
"What
Does Democracy Really Mean In The Middle East? Whatever The West Decides,"
The Independent (UK), 20 August 2005. Fisk wrote, "I have been
driving the dingy, dangerous, oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever
more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops
driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of
us if we approach within 50 meters." I am taken aback by the vermin-like
reference to Iraqi resistance fighters in the phrase "infested with
insurgents." In addition, the word "occupation" or variant doesn't pop up
once in the article.
[2]
Downing Street Documents.
[3] "Building
America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,"
Project for the New American Century, September of 2000. The White
Paper which lays out the neoconservatives' hegemonic ambitions to achieve
global dominance.
[4] "Internet
study shows Canadians are heavy users,"
CBC News, 2 November 2005. A recent study revealed heavy internet
use among Canadians -- averaging 13.5 hours online a week. This impacted
television viewing (3.7 hours less per week than non-users) and
activities: more time spent surfing for information than engaging in
entertainment (6.1 hours versus 3.3 hours weekly). A significant 65 per
cent of internet users reported accessing news sites at least once a week.
[5] "Disinformation:
A Crime Against Humanity and a Crime Against Peace,"
Press Action, 17 February 2005. Following four days of presentation
at the July 2004 Halifax International Symposium on Media and
Disinformation, the participants unanimously declared disinformation to be
a crime against humanity and a crime against peace.
[6] Ashraf Khalil,
Ranya Kadri and Josh Meyer, "Suicide
Attacks Kill at Least 57 at 3 Hotels in Jordan's Capital,"
LA Times, 10 November 2005.
[7] Yoav Stern and
Zohar Blumenkrantz, "Scores
dead in three Amman hotel bombings; Israelis evacuated before attack,"
Ha'aretz, 10 November 2005. ;
[8] Henk Ruyssenaars,
" Why
the Amman Bombings? Who Profits from all the Killings?"
Foreign Press Foundation, 11 November 2005.
[9] "Bush
Administration Behind Failed Military Coup in Venezuela,"
Project Censored, 2004. The US-instigated April coup attempt was
predicted by Narco News on 20 February 2002. See Kim Alphandary, "Venezuela
Faces U.S. Coup Plot: Washington Seeks End to World's Truest Democracy."
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