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CounterPunch
October
28, 2002
Bush's Wars:
Anti-Terror or Empire Building?
by WILLIAM BLUM
Good evening, it's very nice to be here, especially
since the bombs have not yet begun to fall; I mean in Iraq, not
Boulder; Boulder comes after Iraq and Iran if you folks don't
shape up and stop inviting people like me to speak.
The first time I spoke in public after
September 11 of last year, I spoke at a teach-in at the University
of North Carolina. As a result of that, I and some of the other
speakers were put on a list put out by an organization founded
by Lynne Cheney, the wife of you know who. The organization's
agenda can be neatly surmised by a report it issued, entitled
"Defending Our Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing
America and What Can Be Done About It." In the report and
on their website they listed a large number of comments made
mainly by faculty and students from many schools which indicated
that these people were not warmly embracing America's newest
bombing frenzy. These people were guilty of suggesting that some
foreigners might actually have good reason for hating the United
States, or what I call hating U.S. foreign policy.
Because of that listing, as well as things
I wrote subsequently, I've gotten a lot of hate mail in the past
year, hate e-mail to be exact. I'm waiting to receive my first
e-mail with anthrax in it. Well, there are viruses in e-mail,
why not bacteria?
The hate mail almost never challenges
any fact or idea I express. They attack me mainly on the grounds
of being unpatriotic. They're speaking of some kind of blind
patriotism, but even if they had a more balanced view of it,
they would still be right about me. I'm not patriotic. I don't
want to be patriotic. I'd go so far as to say that I'm patriotically
challenged.
Many people on the left, now as in the
1960s, do not want to concede the issue of patriotism to the
conservatives. The left insists that they are the real patriots
because of demanding that the United States lives up to its professed
principles. That's all well and good, but I'm not one of those
leftists. I don't think that patriotism is one of the more noble
sides of mankind. George Bernard Shaw wrote that patriotism is
the conviction that your country is superior to all others because
you were born in it. And remember that the German people who
supported the Nazi government can be seen as being patriotic,
and the German government called them just that.
The past year has not been easy for people
like me, surrounded as we've been by an orgy of patriotism. How
does one escape "United We Stand," and "God Bless
America"? And the flag - it's just all over - I buy a banana
and there it is, an American flag stuck on it.
We're making heroes out of everyone -
the mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, became a hero. On Sept.
10 he was an arrogant, uncompassionate reactionary - suddenly
he was a hero, even a statesman, speaking before the U.N. George
Bush also became a hero. People who called him a moron on September
10 welcomed him as hero and dictator after the eleventh.
In the play, Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht,
one character says to another: "Unhappy the land that has
no heroes." The other character replies: "No. Unhappy
the land that needs heroes."
Although I'm not loyal to any country
or government, like most of you I am loyal to certain principles,
like political and social justice, economic democracy, human
rights.
The moral of my message to you is this:
If your heart and mind tell you clearly that the bombing of impoverished,
hungry, innocent peasants is a terrible thing to do and will
not make the American people any more secure, you should protest
it in any way you can and don't be worried about being called
unpatriotic.
There was, sadly, very little protest
against the bombing of Afghanistan. I think it was a measure
of how the events intimidated people, events, along with their
expanding police powers, led by Ayatollah John Ashcroft. I think
it was also due to the fact that people felt that whatever horrors
the bombing caused, it did get rid of some really nasty anti-American
terrorists.
But of the thousands in Afghanistan who
died from American bombs, how many do you think had any part
in the events of 9-11? I'll make a rough guess and say "none."
How many do you think ever took part in any other terrorist act
against the United States? We'll never know for sure, but my
guess would be a number in the very low one digits, if that.
Terrorist acts don't happen very often after all, and usually
are carried out by a handful of men. So, of all those killed
by the American actions, were any of them amongst any of those
few handfuls of terrorists, many of whom were already in prison?
Keep in mind that the great majority
of those who were at a training camp of al Qaeda in Afghanistan
were there to help the Taliban in their civil war, nothing to
do with terrorism or the United States. It was a religious mission
for them, none of our business. But we killed them or have held
them under terrible conditions at the Guantanamo base in Cuba
for a very long time now, with no end in sight, with many attempts
at suicide there amongst the prisoners.
It is remarkable indeed that what we
call our government is still going around dropping huge amounts
of exceedingly powerful explosives upon the heads of defenseless
people. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Beginning in the late
1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to the Soviet police state,
then the Berlin Wall came down. People all over Eastern Europe
were joyfully celebrating a NEW DAY, and South Africa freed Nelson
Mandela and apartheid began to crumble, and Haiti held its first
free election ever and chose a genuine progressive as president
... it seemed like anything was possible; optimism was as widespread
as pessimism is today.
The United States joined this celebration
by invading and bombing Panama, only weeks after the Berlin Wall
fell.
At the same time, the U.S. was shamelessly
intervening in the election in Nicaragua to defeat the Sandinistas.
Then, when Albania and Bulgaria, "newly
freed from the grip of communism," as our media would put
it, dared to elect governments not acceptable to Washington,
Washington just stepped in and overthrew those governments.
Soon came the bombing of the people of
Iraq for 40 horrible days without mercy, for no good or honest
reason, and that was that for our hopes of a different and better
world.
But our leaders were not through. They
were soon off attacking Somalia, more bombing and killing.
Meanwhile they continued bombing Iraq
for years.
They intervened to put down dissident
movements in Peru, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, just as if it
were the cold war in the 1950s in Latin America, and the 1960s,
the 1970s, the 1980s, and still doing it in the 1990s.
Then they bombed the people of Yugoslavia
for 78 days and nights.
And once again, last year, they grossly
and openly intervened in an election in Nicaragua to prevent
the left from winning.
Meanwhile, of course, they were bombing
Afghanistan and, in all likelihood, have now killed more innocent
civilians in that sad country than were killed here on Sept.
11, with more to come as people will continue to die from bombing
wounds, cluster-bomb landmines, and depleted-uranium toxicity.
All these years, they're still keeping
their choke hold on Cuba. And that's just a partial list.
There was none of the peace dividend
we had been promised, not for Americans nor for the rest of the
world.
What the heck is going on here? We had
been taught since childhood that the cold war, including the
Korean War, the Vietnam War, the huge military budgets, all the
foreign invasions and overthrows of governments - the ones we
knew about - was all to fight the same menace: The International
Communist Conspiracy, headquarters in Moscow.
So what happened? The Soviet Union was
dissolved. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The East European satellites
became independent. The former communists even became capitalists....yet
nothing changed in American foreign policy. Even NATO remained,
NATO which had been created - so we were told - to protect Western
Europe against a Soviet invasion, even NATO remains, bigger than
ever, getting bigger and more powerful all the time, a NATO with
a global mission. The NATO charter was even invoked to give a
justification for its members to join the U.S. in the Afghanistan
invasion.
The whole thing had been a con game.
The Soviet Union and something called communism per se had not
been the object of our global attacks. There had never been an
International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains,
any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in
the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever
name we give to the enemy - communist, rogue state, drug trafficker,
terrorist.
You think the American Empire is against
terrorists? What do you call a man who blows up an airplane killing
73 people, who attempts assassinations against several diplomats,
who fires cannons at ships docked in American ports? What do
you call a man who places bombs in numerous commercial and diplomatic
buildings in the U.S. and abroad? Dozens of such acts. His name
is Orlando Bosch, he's Cuban and he lives in Miami, unmolested
by the authorities. The city of Miami once declared a day in
his honor - Orlando Bosch Day. He was freed from prison in Venezuela,
where he had been held for the airplane bombing, partly because
of pressure from the American ambassador, Otto Reich, who earlier
this year was appointed to the State Dept. by George W.
After Bosch returned to the U.S. in 1988,
the Justice Dept condemned him as a totally violent terrorist
and was all set to deport him, but that was blocked by President
Bush, the first, with the help of son Jeb Bush in Florida. So
is George W. and his family against terrorism? Well, yes, they're
against those terrorists who are not allies of the empire.
The plane that Bosch bombed, by the way,
was a Cuban plane. He's wanted in Cuba for that and a host of
other serious crimes, and the Cubans have asked Washington to
turn him over to them; to Cuba he's like Osama Bin Laden is to
the United States. But the U.S. has refused. Can you imagine
the reaction in Washington if bin Laden showed up in Havana and
the Cubans refused to turn him over? Can you imagine the reaction
in the United States if Havana proclaimed Osama Bin Laden Day?
Washington's support of genuine terrorist
organizations has been very extensive. To give just a couple
of examples of the past few years - The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
have carried out numerous terrorist attacks for years in various
parts of the Balkans, but they've been our allies because they've
attacked people out of favor with Washington.
The paramilitaries in Colombia, as vicious
as they come, could not begin to carry out their dirty work without
the support of the Colombian military, who are the recipients
of virtually unlimited American support. This, all by itself,
disqualifies Washington from leading a war against terrorism.
Bush also speaks out often and angrily
against harboring terrorists. Does he really mean that? Well,
what country harbors more terrorists than the United States?
Orlando Bosch is only one of the numerous anti-Castro Cubans
in Miami who have carried out hundreds, if not thousands of terrorist
acts, in the U.S., in Cuba, and elsewhere; all kinds of arson
attacks, assassinations and bombings. They have been harbored
here in safety for decades as have numerous other friendly terrorists,
torturers and human rights violators from Guatemala, El Salvador,
Haiti, Indonesia and elsewhere, all allies of the Empire.
The CIA is looking for terrorists in
caves in the mountains of Afghanistan at the same time as the
Agency sits in bars in Miami having beers with terrorists.
What are we to make of all this? How
are we to understand our government's foreign policy? Well, if
I were to write a book called The American Empire for Dummies,
page one would say: Don't ever look for the moral factor. U.S.
foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. Clear
your mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of seeing
beyond the cliches and the platitudes.
I know it's not easy for most Americans
to take what I say at face value. It's not easy to swallow my
message. They see our leaders on TV and their photos in the press;
they see them smiling or laughing, telling jokes; see them with
their families, hear them speak of God and love, of peace and
law, of democracy and freedom, of human rights and justice and
even baseball ... How can such people be moral monsters; how
can they be called immoral?
They have names like George and Dick
and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah in the bunch. And
they even speak English. Well, George almost does. People named
Mohammed or Abdullah cut off arms or legs as punishment for theft.
We know that that's horrible. We're too civilized for that. But
people named George and Dick and Donald drop cluster bombs on
cities and villages, and the many unexploded ones become land
mines, and before very long, a child picks one up or steps on
one of them and loses an arm or leg, or both arms or both legs,
and sometimes their eyesight. The cluster bombs which actually
explode do their own kind of horror.
But our leaders are perhaps not so much
immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure
in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't
care ... if that's a distinction worth making. As long as the
death and suffering advance the agenda of the Empire, as long
as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and
power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering
aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they
just don't care about it happening to other people, including
the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come
home - the ones who make it back - with Agent Orange or Gulf
War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. Our leaders would not
be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things.
It must be great fun to be one of the
leaders of an empire, glorious in fact ... intoxicating ... the
feeling that you can do whatever you want to whomever you want
for as long as you want for any reason you care to give ... because
you have the power ... for theirs is the power and the glory.
When I was writing my book "Rogue
State" a few years ago, I used the term "American Empire,"
which I don't think I had seen in print before. I used the term
cautiously because I wasn't sure the American public was quite
ready for it. But I needn't have been so cautious. It's now being
used proudly by supporters of the empire.
There's Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative
intellectual at the Hoover Institution. Earlier this year he
wrote an article entitled "In praise of American empire",
in which he argued that Americans must finally recognize that
the U.S. "has become an empire, the most magnanimous imperial
power ever."
Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment
writes: "And the truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised
by the U.S. is good for a vast portion of the world's population.
It is certainly a better international arrangement than all realistic
alternatives."
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer
speaks of America's "uniquely benign imperium."
So that's how people who are wedded to
American foreign policy are able to live with it - they conclude,
and proclaim, and may even believe, that our foreign policy is
a benevolent force, an enlightened empire, bringing order, prosperity
and civilized behavior to all parts of the globe, and if we're
forced to go to war we conduct a humanitarian war.
Well, inasmuch as I've devoted much of
my adult life to documenting in minute detail the exact opposite,
to showing the remarkable cruelty and horrific effects of U.S.
interventions on people in every corner of the world, you can
understand, I think, that my reaction to such claims is ... Huh?
These conservative intellectuals ... Is that an oxymoron? They
are as amoral as the folks in the White House and the Pentagon.
After all, the particles of depleted uranium are not lodging
inside their lungs to keep radiating for the rest of their lives;
the International Monetary Fund is not bankrupting their economy
and slashing their basic services; it's not their families wandering
in the desert as refugees.
The leaders of the empire, the imperial
mafia - Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Powell and Rice and
Wolfowitz and Perle - and their scribes as well, are as fanatic
and as fundamentalist as Osama Bin Laden. And the regime change
they accomplished in Afghanistan has really gone to their heads.
Today Kabul, tomorrow the world.
So get used to it, world. The American
Empire. Soon to be a major motion picture, coming to a theatre
near you.
A while ago, I heard a union person on
the radio proposing what he called "a radical solution to
poverty - pay people enough to live on." Well, I'd like
to propose a radical solution to anti-American terrorism - stop
giving terrorists the motivation to attack America.
Now our leaders and often our media would
have us believe that we're targeted because of our freedom, our
democracy, our wealth, our modernity, our secular government,
our simple goodness, and other stories suitable for schoolbooks.
George W. is still repeating these cliches a year after 9-11.
Well, he may believe it but other officials have known better
for some time. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded:
"Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S.
involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist
attacks against the United States."
Jimmy Carter, some years after he left
the White House, was unambiguous in his agreement with such a
conclusion. He said:
We sent Marines into Lebanon and you
only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness
first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United
States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed
totally innocent villagers - women and children and farmers and
housewives -- in those villages around Beirut. ... As a result
of that ... we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who
are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of
our hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist
attacks.
The terrorists responsible for the bombing
of the World Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York
Times which stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility
for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was
done in response for the American political, economical, and
military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the
rest of the dictator countries in the region."
And finally, several members of al Qaeda
have repeatedly made it quite plain in the past year that it's
things like U.S. support of Israeli massacres and the bombing
of Iraq that makes them hate the United States.
I present more evidence of the same sort
in one of my books along with a long list of U.S. actions in
the Middle East that has created hatred of American foreign policy.
I don't think, by the way, that poverty
plays much of a role in creating terrorists. We shouldn't confuse
terrorism with revolution.
And the attacks are not going to end
until we stop bombing innocent people and devastating villages
and grand old cities and poisoning the air and the gene pool
with depleted uranium. The attacks are not going to end until
we stop supporting gross violators of human rights who oppress
their people, until we stop doing a whole host of terrible things.
We'll keep on adding to the security operations that's turning
our society into a police state, and it won't make us much safer.
It's not just people in the Middle East
who have good reason for hating what our government does; we've
created huge numbers of potential terrorists all over Latin America
during a half century of American actions far worse than what
we've done in the Middle East. I think that if Latin Americans
shared the belief of many Muslims that they will go directly
to heaven for giving up their life and acting as a martyr against
the great enemy, by now we would have had decades of repeated
terrorist horror coming from south of the border. As it is, there
have been many non-suicidal terrorist attacks against Americans
and their buildings in Latin America over the years.
There's also the people of Asia and Africa.
The same story.
The State Department recently held a
conference on how to improve America's image abroad in order
to reduce the level of hatred; image is what they're working
on, not change of policies.
But the policies scorecard reads as follows:
From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted
to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more
than 30 populist movements fighting against insufferable regimes.
In the process, the U.S. bombed about 25 countries, caused the
end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions
more to a life of agony and despair.
If I were the president, I could stop
terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently.
I would first apologize - very publicly and very sincerely -
to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished,
and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.
Then I would announce that America's global interventions have
come to an end and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st
state of the union but - believe it or not - a foreign country.
I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90 percent
and use the savings to pay reparations to our victims and repair
the damage from our bombings. There would be enough money. Do
you know what one year's military budget is equal to? One year.
It's equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since
Jesus Christ was born.
That's what I'd do on my first three
days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.
On page two of The American Empire for
Dummies, I'd put this in a box outlined in bright red: Following
its bombing of Iraq, the United States wound up with military
bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United
Arab Emirates.
Following its bombing of Yugoslavia,
the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania,
Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following its bombing of Afghanistan,
the United States is now winding up with military bases in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia
and perhaps elsewhere in the region.
That's not very subtle, is it? Not really
covert. The men who run the empire are not easily embarrassed.
And that's the way the empire grows, a base on every corner,
ready to be mobilized to put down any threat to imperial rule,
real or imagined. Fifty-seven years after World War II ended,
the U.S. still has major bases in Germany and Japan; and 49 years
after the Korean War ended, the U.S. military is still in Korea.
A Pentagon report of a few years ago
said: Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a
new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union
or elsewhere ... we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional
or global role.
The bombing, invasion and occupation
of Afghanistan have served the purpose of setting up a new government
that will be sufficiently amenable to Washington's international
objectives, including the installation of military bases and
communications listening stations and, perhaps most important
of all, the running of secure oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan
from the Caspian Sea region, which I'm sure many of you have
heard about.
For years, the American oil barons have
had their eyes on the vast oil and gas reserves of the Caspian
Sea area, ideally with an Afghanistan-Pakistan route to the Indian
Ocean, thus keeping Russia and Iran out of the picture. The oilmen
have been quite open about this, giving very frank testimony
before Congress for example.
Now they have their eyes on the even
greater oil reserves of Iraq. If the U.S. overthrows Saddam Hussein
and installs a puppet government, as they did in Afghanistan,
the American oil companies will move into Iraq and have a feast
and the American empire will add another country and a few more
bases.
Or as General William Looney, the head
of the <U.S.-U.K>. operation that flies over Iraq and bombs
them every few days, said several years ago: If they turn on
their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn missiles. They
know we own their country. We own their airspace. ... We dictate
the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America
right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of
oil out there we need.
We've gone through a few months now of
a song and dance show that passes for debate, a debate about
whether to attack a sovereign nation that has not attacked us,
that has not threatened to attack us, that knows it would mean
instant mass suicide for them if they attacked us. This debate
is absurd not simply because Iraq is not a threat - by now, even
the Martians must know that - but because our imperial mafia
know that Iraq is not a threat, at all. They've been telling
us one story after another about why Iraq is a threat, an imminent
threat, a nuclear threat, a threat increasing in danger with
each passing day, that Iraq is a terrorist state, that Iraq is
tied to al Qaeda, only to have each story amount to nothing;
they told us for a long time that Iraq must agree to having the
weapons inspectors back in, and when Iraq agreed to this they
said "No, no, that isn't good enough."
How soon before they blame the horror
in Bali on Iraq?
Does any of this make sense? This sudden
urgency of fighting a war in the absence of a fight? It does,
I suggest, only if you understand that this is not about Saddam
Hussein and his evilness, or his weapons, or terrorism. What
it's about is that the empire is still hungry and wants to eat
Iraq and its oil and needs to present excuses to satisfy gullible
people. And then they want to eat Iran. And then? ... I understand
when George W. was asked: "Who next?" he said "Whatever."
The empire, in case you missed it, is
not content with merely the earth; the empire has been officially
extended to outer space. The Pentagon proudly admits this and
they have a nice name for it. They call it "full-spectrum
dominance," and for years now they've been planning to fight
wars in space, from space, and into space. And that's a quote.
And if you're wondering "Why now?"
about Iraq. I think - as many have said - that the coming election
plays a role. It's going to decide which party will control congress
and there's nothing like a lot of talk about war and defending
America to sway voters, and make them forget about the economy
and health care at the same time.
In addition to all the absurdities and
lies they've been throwing at us, what I've found most remarkable
and disturbing about this period has been the great absence in
the mass media of the simple reminder that a U.S. attack upon
Iraq means bombs falling on people, putting an end to homes,
schools, hospitals, jobs, futures. The discussion has focused
almost entirely on whether or not to go after the evil Saddam
and his supposed evil weapons. What it all means in terms of
human suffering is scarcely considered worthy of attention. Is
that not odd?
Also absent from the discussion is that
over the course of several years in the 1990s, the U.N. inspectors
found and destroyed huge amounts of chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons in Iraq. I'm sure that most Americans are convinced
that Saddam got away with hiding virtually all his weapons and
that he'll get away with it again if there's a resumption of
the inspections. But that's not what happened. Scott Ritter,
chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, recently stated that "since
1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed; 90-95 percent of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction have been verifiably eliminated.
This includes all of the factories used to produce chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons, and long-range ballistic missiles;
the associated equipment of these factories; and the vast majority
of the products coming out of these factories."
And we have similar testimony from others
who were involved in the inspections.
Each of the big American bombing campaigns
carries its own myths with it, but none so big as the one before
last. I must remind you of that.
We were told that the <U.S./NATO>
bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was to save the people of Kosovo
from ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. And since the ethnic cleansing
finally came to an end, the bombing seems to have worked. Right?
First there was the ethnic cleansing, then came the bombing,
then came the end of the ethnic cleansing. What could be simpler?
I'm sure that about 90 percent of those Americans who think about
such things firmly believe that, including many of you, I imagine.
But it was all a lie. The bombing didn't
end the ethnic cleansing. The bombing caused the ethnic cleansing!
The systematic forced deportations of large numbers of Kosovars
- what we call ethnic cleansing - did not begin until about two
days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it
by the Serb forces, born of great anger and feelings of powerlessness
due to the heavy bombardment. This is easily verified by looking
at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began
the night of March 23/24, and the few days after. Or simply look
at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:
... with the NATO bombing already begun,
a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city
of Kosovo] that the Serbs would NOW vent their rage against ethnic
Albanian civilians in retaliation.
The next day, March 27, we find the first
reference to a "forced march" or anything of that sort.
How is it possible that such a powerful
lie could be told to the American people and that the people
would swallow it without gagging? One reason is that the media
don't explicitly point out the lies; at best you have to read
between the lines.
There's the story from the Cold War about
a group of Russian writers touring the United States. They were
astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching
television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues
were the same. "In our country," said one of them,
"to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison
people. We torture them. Here you have none of that. How do you
do it? What's the secret?"
Can any of you name a single American
daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the <U.S.-NATO>
bombing of Yugoslavia three years ago?
Can any of you name a single American
daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the U.S. bombing of
Iraq eleven years ago?
Can any of you name a single American
daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan?
Isn't that remarkable? In a supposedly
free society, with a supposedly free press, with about 1500 daily
newspapers, the odds should be way against that being the case.
But that's the way it is.
I suppose that now some of you would
like me to tell you how to put an end to all these terrible and
absurd things I've talked about. Well, good luck to all of us.
I could say that personally I proceed
from the assumption that if enough people understand what their
government is doing and the harm that it causes, at some point
the number of such people will reach critical mass and some changes
can be effectuated. But that may well be a long way off. I hope
I live to see it.
I'm sure that if all Americans could
see their government's bomb victims up close, see the body fragments,
smell the burning flesh, see the devastated homes and lives and
communities, there would be a demand to end such horror so powerful
that even the imperial mafia madmen couldn't ignore it. But how
to get Americans to see the victims? I and many of you don't
need to see those terrible sights to be opposed to the madmen's
policies, but most Americans do. If we could figure out why we
have this deep empathy for the victims, this imagination, it
might be a very good organizing tool.
Gandhi once said that "Almost anything
you do will be insignificant, but you must do it." And the
reason I must do it is captured by yet another adage, cited by
various religious leaders: "We do these things not to change
the world, but so that the world will not change us."
Sam Smith, a journalist in Washington,
whom some of you are familiar with, in his new book makes the
point that "Those who think history has left us helpless
should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870,
the labor organizer of 1890, and the gay or lesbian writer of
1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history
but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it."
He then asks: Knowing what we know now
about how certain things turned out, but also knowing how long
it took, would we have been abolitionists in 1830, or feminists
in 1870, and so on?
We don't know what surprises history
has in store for us when we give history a little shove, just
as history can give each of us a little shove personally. In
the 1960s, I was working at the State Department, my heart set
on becoming a Foreign Service Officer. Little did I know that
I would soon become a ranting and raving commie-pinko-subversive-enemy
of all that is decent and holy because a thing called Vietnam
came along. So there is that kind of hope as well.
Let me close with two of the laws of
politics which came out of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s,
which I like to cite:
The First Watergate Law of American Politics
states: "No matter how paranoid you are, what the government
is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
The Second Watergate Law states: "Don't
believe anything until it's been officially denied."
Both laws are still on the books.
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue
State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
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