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MY GOVERNMENT IS THE WORLD'S LEADING
PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE
- Martin Luther King, Jnr., 1967
SHOCKED & HORRIFIED
By Larry Mosqueda, Ph.D.
The Evergreen State College - 15 September 2001
Like
all Americans, on Tuesday, 9-11, I was
shocked and horrified
to watch the WTC Twin Towers attacked by
hijacked planes and
collapse, resulting in the deaths of perhaps
up to 10,000 innocent
people. I had not been that shocked
and horrified since
January 16, 1991, when then President Bush attacked Baghdad, and the
rest of Iraq and began killing 200,000 people during that "war"
(slaughter). This includes the infamous "highway of death" in the
last days of the slaughter when U.S. pilots literally shot in the
back retreating Iraqi civilians and
soldiers.
I continue to be horrified
by the sanctions on Iraq, which have resulted in the death of
over 1,000,000 Iraqis, including over 500,000 children, about whom
former Secretary of State Madeline Allbright has stated, their
deaths "are worth the cost".
Over the course of my life I
have been shocked and horrified by a variety of U.S.
governmental actions, such as the U.S. sponsored coup against
democracy in Guatemala in 1954 which resulted in the deaths of
over 120,000 Guatemalan peasants by U.S. installed dictatorships
over the course of four decades.
Last Tuesday's events
reminded me of the horror I felt when the U.S. overthrew the
government of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and helped to murder
3,000 people. And it reminded me of the shock I felt in 1973,
when the U.S. sponsored a coup in Chile against the democratic
government of Salvador Allende and helped to murder another
30,000 people, including U.S. citizens.
Last Tuesday's events
reminded me of the shock and horror I felt in 1965
when the U.S. sponsored a coup in Indonesia that resulted in
the murder of over 800,000 people, and the subsequent slaughter
in 1975 of over 250,000 innocent people in East Timor by the
Indonesian regime, with the direct complicity of President Ford
and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
I was reminded of the shock
and horror I felt during the U.S. sponsored
terrorist contra war (the World Court
declared the U.S.
government a war criminal in 1984 for the
mining of the
harbors) against Nicaragua in the 1980s
which resulted in the
deaths of over 30,000 innocent people (or as
the U.S. government
used to call them before the term
"collateral damage" was invented --"soft targets").
I was reminded of being
horrified by the U. S. war against the people of El
Salvador in the 1980s, which resulted in the brutal deaths of over
80,000 people, or "soft targets".
I was
reminded of the shock and horror I felt
during the U.S. sponsored terror war against the
peoples of southern Africa (especially
Angola) that began in
the 1970's and continues to this day, and
has resulted in the
deaths and mutilations of over 1,000,000. I
was reminded of the
shock and horror I felt as the U.S. invaded
Panama over the
Christmas season of 1989 and killed
over 8,000 in an attempt to capture George H. Bush's CIA
partner, now turned enemy, Manuel Noriega.
I was reminded of the horror
I felt when I learned about how the Shah of Iran
was installed in a U.S. sponsored brutal coup that resulted in the
deaths of over 70,000 Iranians from 1952-1979. And the
continuing shock as I learned that the
Ayatollah Khomani,
who overthrew the Shah in 1979, and
who was the U.S.
public enemy for decade of the 1980s, was
also on the CIA payroll, while he was in exile in
Paris in the 1970s.
I was reminded of the shock and horror that I felt
as I learned about the how the U.S. has "manufactured consent"
since 1948 for its support of Israel, to the exclusion of
virtually any rights for the Palestinians in
their native lands
resulting in ever worsening day-to-day
conditions for the
people of Palestine.
I was shocked as I learned
about the hundreds of
towns and villages that were literally wiped
off the face of the
earth in the early days of Israeli
colonization. I was
horrified in 1982 as the villagers of Sabra
and Shatila were
massacred by Israeli allies with direct
Israeli complicity and direction. The untold
thousands who died on that day match the scene of horror that we
saw last Tuesday.
But those scenes were not repeated over and
over again on the national media to inflame the American
public.
The events and images of
last Tuesday have
been appropriately compared to the
horrific events and
images of Lebanon in the 1980s with resulted
in the deaths of tens
of thousand of people, with no reference to the fact that the
country that inflicted the terror on Lebanon was Israel, with U.S.
backing.
I still continue to be
shocked at how mainstream commentators refer to "Israeli settlers"
in the "occupied territories" with no sense of irony as they
report on who are the aggressors in the region.
Of course, the largest and
most shocking war crime of the second half of the 20th
century was the U.S. assault on Indochina from 1954-1975, especially
Vietnam, where over 4,000,000 people were bombed, napalmed,
crushed, shot and individually "hands on" murdered in the "Phoenix
Program" (this is where Oliver North got his start).
Many U.S. Vietnam veterans
were also victimized by this war and had the best of
intentions, but the policy makers themselves knew the criminality of
their actions and policies as revealed in
their own words in
"The Pentagon Papers," released by Daniel
Ellsberg of the RAND
Corporation. In 1974 Ellsberg noted that our
Presidents from
Truman to Nixon continually lied to the U.S.
public about the
purpose and conduct of the war. He has
stated that, "It is a tribute to the American people that
our leaders perceived that they had to lie to us, it is not a
tribute to us that we were so easily
misled."
I was continually shocked
and horrified as the U.S. attacked and bombed with impunity the
nation of Libya in the 1980s, including killing the infant
daughter of Khadafi.
I was shocked as the U.S. bombed and
invaded Grenada in 1983. I was horrified by U.S. military and CIA
actions in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Brazil, Argentina,
and Yugoslavia. The deaths in these actions ran into the
hundreds of thousands.
The above list is by no means complete or
comprehensive. It is merely a list that is easily accessible
and not unknown, especially to the economic and intellectual
elites. It has just been conveniently eliminated from the public
discourse and public consciousness.
And for the most part, the
analysis that the U.S. actions have resulted in the deaths of
primarily civilians (over 90%) is not unknown to these elites and
policy makers. A conservative number for those who have
been killed by U.S. terror and military action since World
War II is 8,000,000 people.
Repeat -- 8,000,000 people
This does not include the
wounded, the imprisoned, the displaced, the refugees,
etc. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in 1967, during the Vietnam
War, "My government is the world's leading purveyor of
violence."
Shocking and horrifying.
Nothing that I have written
is meant to disparage or disrespect those who were victims and
those who suffered death or the loss of a loved one during
this week's events. It is not meant to "justify" any action by
those who bombed the Twin Towers or the Pentagon. It is meant
to put it in a context.
If we believe that the
actions were those of "madmen", they are "madmen" who are able to
keep a secret for 2 years or more among over 100 people, as
they trained to execute a complex plan. While not the acts of
madmen, they are apparently the acts
of "fanatics" who,
depending on who they really are, can find
real grievances, but
whose actions are illegitimate.
Osama Bin Laden at this point has been
accused by the media and the government of being the mastermind of
Tuesday's bombings. Given the government's track record on
lying to the America people, that should not be accepted as
fact at this time. If indeed Bin Laden is the mastermind of this
action, he is responsible for the deaths of perhaps 10,000 people - a
shocking and horrible crime.
Ed Herman in his book The
Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda does not
justify any terrorism
but points out that states often engage in
"wholesale" terror, while those whom governments
define as "terrorist" engage is "retail" terrorism. While
qualitatively the results are the same
for the individual
victims of terrorism, there is a clear
quantitative difference.
And as Herman and others
point out, the seeds, the roots, of much of the "retail" terror are
in fact found in the "wholesale" terror of states.
Again this is not to
justify, in any way, the actions of last
Tuesday, but to put
them in a context and suggest an
explanation.
Perhaps most shocking and horrific,
if indeed Bin Laden is the mastermind of Tuesday's actions; he has
clearly had significant training in logistics, armaments, and
military training, etc. by competent and expert military personnel.
And indeed he has. During the 1980s, he was recruited, trained
and funded by the CIA in Afghanistan to fight against the Russians.
As long as he visited his terror on Russians and his enemies in
Afghanistan, he was "our man" in that country.
The same is true of Saddam
Hussein of Iraq, who
was a CIA asset in Iraq during the
1980s. Hussein could gas his own people, repress the
population, and invade his neighbor (Iran) as long as he did it with
U.S. approval.
The same was true of Manuel Noriega of Panama, who was a
contemporary and CIA partner of George H. Bush in the 1980s.
Noriega's main crime for Bush, the father, was not that he
dealt drugs (he did, but the U.S. and Bush knew this before 1989), but
that Noriega was no longer going to cooperate in the
ongoing U.S. terrorist contra war against
Nicaragua. This
information is not unknown or really
controversial among elite policy makers. To repeat,
this not to justify any of the actions of last Tuesday, but to put it
in its horrifying context.
As shocking as the events of
last Tuesday were, they are likely to generate even more
horrific actions by the U.S. government that will add significantly
to the 8,000,000 figure stated above.
This response may well be
qualitatively and quantitatively worse than the events of Tuesday.
The New York Times headline of 9/14/01 states that, "Bush
And Top Aides Proclaim Policy Of Ending States That Back
Terror" as if that was a rationale, measured, or even sane
option. States that have been identified for possible elimination are
"a number of Asian and African countries, like Afghanistan,
Iraq, Sudan, and even Pakistan."
This is beyond shocking
and horrific - it is just as potentially
suicidal, homicidal, and more insane than the
hijackers themselves.
Also, qualitatively, these
actions will be even worse than the original bombers if one
accepts the mainstream premise that those involved are "madmen",
"religious fanatics", or a "terrorist group." If so,
they are acting as either individuals or as a small group. The
U.S. actions may continue the homicidal policies of a few thousand
elites for the past 50 years, involving both political parties.
The retail terror is that of
desperate and
sometime fanatical small groups and
individuals who often have legitimate grievances, but
engage in individual criminal and illegitimate activities; the
wholesale terror is that of "rational" educated men where the pain,
suffering, and deaths of millions of people are contemplated,
planned, and too often, executed, for the purpose of
furthering a nebulous concept called the "national interest".
Space does not allow a full
explanation of the elites' Orwellian concept of the
"national interest", but it can be
summarized as the
protection and expansion of hegemony and an
imperial empire.
The American public is being
prepared for war while being fed a continuous stream of
shocking and horrific repeated images of Tuesday's events and
heartfelt stories from the survivors and the loved ones of those who
lost family members. These stories are real and should not be
diminished. In fact, those who lost
family members can be
considered a representative sample of
humanity of the
8,000,000 who have been lost previously. If
we multiply by 800
-1000 times the amount of pain, angst, and
anger being currently
felt by the American public, we might begin
to understand how
much of the rest of the world feels as they
are continually
victimized.
Some particularly poignant
images are the heart wrenching public stories that we are
seeing and hearing of family members with pictures and flyers
searching for their loved ones. These images are virtually the
same as those of the "Mothers of the Disappeared" who searched
for their (primarily) adult children in places such as Argentina,
where over 11,000 were "disappeared" in 1976-1982, again with
U.S. approval. Just as the mothers of Argentina deserved our
respect and compassion, so do the relatives of those who are
searching for their relatives now.
However we should not allow
ourselves to be manipulated by the media and U.S.
government into turning real grief and anger into a national policy of
wholesale terror and genocide against innocent civilians in Asia
and Africa. What we are seeing in military terms is called "softening
the target."
The target here is the
American public and
we are being ideologically and emotionally
prepared for the
slaughter that may commence soon. None
of the previously
identified Asian and African countries are
democracies, which
means that the people of these countries
have virtually no impact on developing the policies
of their governments, even if we assume that these governments are
complicit in Tuesday's actions. When one examines the recent
history of these countries, one will find that the American
government had direct and indirect
influences on
creating the conditions for the existence of
some of these
governments. This is especially true of the
Taliban government of
Afghanistan itself.
The New York Metropolitan
Area has about 21,000,000 people or about 8% of the
U.S. population. Almost everyone in America knows someone who has been
killed, injured or traumatized by the events of Tuesday. I
know that I do. Many people are calling for "revenge" or "vengeance"
and comments such as "kill them all" have been circulated on the
TV, radio, and email. A few more potentially benign comments
have called for "justice." This is only potentially benign since
that term may be defined by people such as Bush and Colin Powell.
Powell is an unrepentant participant in the Vietnam War, the
terrorist contra war against Nicaragua, and the Gulf war, at each level
becoming more responsible for the planning and execution of
the policies.
Those affected, all of us, must do everything in our
power to prevent a wider war and even greater atrocity, do
everything possible to stop the
genocide if it
starts, and hold those responsible for their
potential war crimes
during and after the war.
If there is a great war in
2001 and it is not
catastrophic (a real possibility), the
crimes of that war will be revisited upon the U.S. over the next
generation. That is not some kind of religious prophecy or
threat, it is merely a straightforward
political analysis.
If indeed it is Bin Laden,
the world must not deal only with him as an individual
criminal, but eliminate the conditions that
create the injustices
and war crimes that will inevitably lead to
more of these types
of attacks in the future. The phrase "No
Justice, No Peace" is
more than a slogan used in a march, it
is an observable historical fact.
It is time to end the horror
In a few short pages it is
impossible to delineate all of the events described over
the past week or to give a comprehensive accounting
of U.S. foreign policy. Below are a few resources
for up to date news and some background reading, by
Noam Chomsky, the
noted analyst. The titles of the books
explain their
relevance for this topic.
For the most current
information see:
http://www.commondreams.org
For information on how the
media distorts the news see:
http://www.fair.org
For excellent links on the
Middle East see:
http://al-awda.org/newyork/links.html
For background reading by
Noam Chomsky see:
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in
Democratic Societies
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy
of the Mass Media
(with Ed Herman) Fateful Triangle: The
United States, Israel
and the Palestinians: Deterring Democracy
9-11
ATTACK: THE ATTACK ON TRUTH
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