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CounterPunch
March 7,
2003
The War on the Dark Corners
of the World
Resisting
the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike
By FIDEL CASTRO
These are hard times we are living in. In recent
months, we have more than once heard chilling words and statements.
In his speech to West Point graduating cadets on June 1 2002,
the United States president declared: "Our security will
require transforming the military you will lead, a military that
must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner
of the world."
That same day, he proclaimed the doctrine
of the pre-emptive strike, something no one had ever done in
the political history of the world. A few months later, referring
to the unnecessary and almost certain military action against
Iraq, he said: "And if war is forced upon us, we will fight
with the full force and might of the United States army."
That statement was not made by the government
of a small and weak nation, but by the leader of the richest
and mightiest military power that has ever existed, which possesses
thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to obliterate the world's
population several times over--and other terrifying conventional
military systems and weapons of mass destruction.
That is what we are: dark corners of
the world. That is the perception some have of the third world
nations. Never before had anyone offered a better definition;
no one had shown such contempt. The former colonies of powers
that divided the world among them and plundered it for centuries
today make up the group of underdeveloped countries.
There is nothing like full independence,
fair treatment on an equal footing or national security for any
of us; none is a permanent member of the UN security council
with a veto right; none has any possibility of being involved
in the decisions of the international financial institutions;
none can keep its best talents; none can protect itself from
capital flight or the destruction of nature and the environment
caused by the squandering, selfish and insatiable consumerism
of the economically developed countries.
After the last global carnage in the
1940s, we were promised a world of peace, a reduction of the
gap between the rich and poor and the assistance of the highly
developed to the less developed countries. It was all a huge
lie. We had imposed on us an unsustainable and unbearable world
order.
The world is being driven into a dead
end. Within hardly 150 years, the oil and gas it took the planet
300 million years to accumulate will have been depleted. In just
100 years, the world population has grown from 1.5 billion to
over 6 billion people, who will have to depend on energy sources
that are still to be researched and developed. Poverty continues
to grow while old and new diseases threaten whole nations with
annihilation. The world's soil is being eroded and losing its
fertility; the climate is changing; the air that we breathe,
drinking water and the seas are increasingly contaminated.
Authority is being wrenched away from
the United Nations, its established procedures are being obstructed
and the organisation itself destroyed; development assistance
is being reduced; there are continuous demands on the third world
countries to pay a $2.5 trillion debt that cannot be paid under
the present circumstances, while $1 trillion dollars are spent
in ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. Why and for what?
A similar amount is spent on commercial
advertising, sowing consumerist longings that cannot be satisfied
in the minds of billions of people. Why and for what? For the
first time the human species is running a real risk of extinction
due to the insane behaviour of the very same human beings, who
are thus becoming the victims of this "civilisation".
However, no one will fight for us, that
is, for the overwhelming majority, only we will do it. Only we
can save humanity ourselves with the support of millions of manual
and intellectual workers from the developed nations who are conscious
of the catastrophes befalling their peoples. Only we can do it
by sowing ideas, building awareness and mobilising global and
North American public opinion. No one needs to be told this.
You know it very well. Our most sacred duty is to fight, and
fight we will.
Yesterday's
Features
Ann Harrison
No
Lock Up for Medical Marijuana Advocate Jeff Jones!
Gary Leupp
A Very
Fine Thing: Turkey Stands Up to Bush
Winslow T. Wheeler
Inside
the Pentagon's Pork Factory
Chris Floyd
Swing
Blades: How Rumsfeld Filled His Pockets with Pyongyang's Nuclear
Loot
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Sleight of Hand
Ron Lare
UAW Local
600's Opposition to War
David Krieger
Meanwhile, Back at the Security Council
Ralph Nader
How MSNBC Sabotaged Donahue
Anthony Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Donahue: a Response to Ralph Nader
Harry Browne
The
Curse of Bono
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February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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