Inevitable ring to
the unimaginable
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.
* Sept 13th
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Countries that
U.S.A. have bombed since the end of World War II:
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999